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A Yellowknife artist is using his talents to try to reduce barriers for people with lived experience to participate in research and policy discussions about Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD).
Wilfred Joey Klein, who was diagnosed with FASD four years ago, is collaborating with the Canada Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Research Network (CanFASD) to raise money through selling some of his work.
Klein has been painting for over 20 years, specializing in depicting the northern lights.
He prefers to work with oils, after a suggestion from his wife. He finds them perfect for his style, which sometimes includes many layers to distinguish between the lights and the foreground.
“Sometimes it’s just living in that moment and saying, ‘OK, this is for me,’ and appreciating it even more,” he said, about watching the northern lights.
After attending a CanFASD conference for the first time last year in Toronto, he was inspired to try to capture his experience there in a painting.
He’s now selling signed prints of his piece, The Reflection of Acceptance, and giving all the proceeds to CanFASD’s “lived experience leadership fund.” It aims to help remove financial barriers so that people with FASD, or their families or caregivers, can “contribute to research, participate in conferences and advisory groups, and help shape policies and practices.”
Klein’s painting depicts a figure standing on a path of rocks and holding a pair of red shoes while facing a line of people in the distance, with colourful northern lights overhead. He said it incorporates the people he met and was moved by at the conference and also conveys his own feelings as an attendee, along with his usual landscape style.
He said details in it are intentional, with the interactions of people in the distance mirroring specific interactions from the conference. The red shoes represent FASD awareness.
‘The Reflection of Acceptance,’ by Wilfred Joey Klein. (Wilfred Joey Klein/CanFASD)
The rocks are meant to show the figurative jumps from one stone to another, Klein said.
“Whether it’s going from frustration to accomplishment or accomplishment to frustration, vice versa, representing how many jumps we have to make to make things like this happen,” said Klein.
“Because it was my first FASD conference, I had no idea what to expect. And that person in front is representing me and it’s me carrying the red shoes as if I were walking towards the people that have made a difference in the community of FASD.”
Klein was diagnosed in 2022, shortly after moving to Yellowknife from Fort Simpson. It wasn’t easy for him to know where to find resources and support.
He says the figure meant to represent himself in the painting “could be anybody who is in that position where they’re looking for support in FASD.”
Audrey McFarlane of CanFASD said the lived experience leadership fund launched in 2024 and has so far offered support to six people to participate in different activities. One person was able to attend an international conference on FASD to present their work.
“We really do need their voice when we set up research projects, how we advance them and then what we do with that research afterwards,” said McFarlane.