An Artist Talk and Conversation
Saturday, May 16th | 2:00PM
CoLab Arts | New Brunswick, NJ

Join us for an artist talk and conversation around Resonance, a solo exhibition by Chanika Svetvilas presented by coLAB Arts. Svetvilas will be in conversation with Karin Jervert, a teaching artist, writer, and Mad Pride activist, and founder of the Woodland Sunflower Collective. Jervert’s work centers on offering non-pathologizing approaches to diverse consciousness, including visionary, clairvoyant, and clairaudient experiences.

Presented during Mental Health Awareness Month, this program moves beyond awareness to insist on action. Svetvilas’s work calls for equitable access to mental healthcare, challenges exclusionary systems, and advocates for forms of care that are sustained rather than temporary. Her practice seeks to spark dialogue that leads to tangible change—toward prevention, inclusion, and care that reaches everyone.

Through a series of charcoal-text drawings on lined paper, Svetvilas renders her experiences within the mental healthcare system as pithy, fragmented synopses, smeared with fingerprints that resist a sterile, clinical gaze. Incorporating materials tied to her lived experience—such as charcoal and prescription bottles—the exhibition spans sculpture, drawing, and video, foregrounding the personal as both material and method.

Chanika Svetvilas is an interdisciplinary artist based in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, whose practice focuses on mental health difference and the diversity of its lived experience, including stigma and its intersection with Mad Pride and Disability Justice. She was the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab Artist-in-Residence at Princeton University (2022–23) and a Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University (2024–2025). She is currently an Art City Public Artist-in-Residence at coLAB Arts in New Brunswick, NJ (2026). Her first museum solo exhibition, Resounding Remnants, was presented at the Hunterdon Art Museum (2025).

Karin Jervert brings over 15 years of experience in the nonprofit arts sector in New Jersey and previously served as Arts Editor at Mad in America, where she led talks, facilitated workshops, and curated online exhibitions including Creativity and COVID: Art-Making During the Pandemic and Teen Arts: Beyond Labels and Meds, as well as organizing the first annual online Mad Poetry Slam. She currently serves as Mad in the World Liaison, working with 18 global “Mad in” sites.

Also a performing and published poet under the name Sunday blu, Jervert is the author of In Water Not Blood, Threads, and the graphic memoir Tea and Ten Thousand Things.