Brad Necyk is an artist and writer on Vancouver Island, Canada whose practice engages with issues of medicine, mental health, and precarious populations and subjects.

The raw intensity of this work offers viewers a reality check and a chance to contemplate the burgeoning incidence of depression. Necyk makes no judgments. Yet the show’s title, Pharmakon (and a series of photographs with the same name depicting a cocktail of psychotropic medications) poses a paradox. In Plato’s dialogues, pharmakon signifies both an ailment’s cause and its cure – the remedy is the poison.

Is it possible the very therapies we rely on are part of the problem? Are the billions of dollars that Big Pharma reaps from vulnerable populations a wasteful exercise in temporary placebos? Are there more complex and intractable causes for the upsurge of depression, things like competition, inequity and loneliness? These questions raced through my mind as I left. But the show itself offers neither pat answers nor any glimmers of hope.