Billy Bert Young: Cloudburst, currently on view at Museum London, is an incredible experience of colour and dreamlike images that will draw you in deep and hold your attention. Young’s work is captivating and you will surely become personally enthralled with at least one of the pieces, as I did. It has left a lasting impression that I won’t soon forget.

Billy Bert Young’s “Koan and On” has a dreamlike, collage-like style that disrupts the ordinary by juxtaposing fantastical elements with realistically rendered objects. The work leans toward surrealism without overt distortion, while creating an almost unconscious need to keep looking deeper into the hidden elements. From a distance, there is a rhythmic harmony within this work, but up close, it becomes a meditation on time and memory. The visual fragility invites the viewer to witness both a wholeness and the quiet unraveling beneath.

Within “Koan and On,” there is an acute sensitivity to duality, order, erosion, distance, and the intimacy of beauty and decay. Young’s composition carries unity, rough texture, broken edges, and tonal variations that call attention to the instability of the form itself. These elements place the piece in the realm of abstraction while offering something intimate to the viewer. As an artist, I find that the work highlights how process becomes subject — the evidence of both embedded in the surface. There appears to be a back and forth between cohesion and fragmentation in “Koan and On,” layering a visual and emotional experience that grows and intensifies the longer one stands before it.

“Koan and On” reminds with some cruelty and grace that time is never one thing; there is a give and take in the same moment. When I stood before this piece, I felt caught by time. The rhythm of the lines pulled my eyes in. But it is a detail, the pocket watch, that arrests me fully. It feels like the watch’s surface holds the sound of the ticking of each second passing. I immediately felt a deep connection with this rendered object, and the longer I looked, the more apparent it felt. I perceived dementia is a physical form: the slow death of the mind where memories fray, where patterns that are familiar dissolve, and where what once seemed whole becomes fragile and uncertain. I perceived echoes of thought; the slipping away of names, faces, places, and clarity.

But in this sorrow there is a tenderness both in loss and beauty. You can’t choose between them. This makes me think of how the mind unravels not all at once, but fragments. The pocket watch keeps running even when the self begins to fade. This is why the work stays with me: it captures the rhythm of time itself, holding me in its silence long after I’ve looked away. “Koan and On’s” beautiful mystic images reduced me to tears. The colours, the shapes, the lines play beautifully together with storybook-like images that tick away quietly with the fading of the mind. It is a piece to be experienced and to be felt with one’s soul.

Kim Crawford is a retired hairstylist of 40 years and is currently a second year Fine Art student at Fanshawe College. She has discovered a passion for written art as well as printmaking and sculpture. She made the decision to return to school late in life to broaden her love for creating art. After growing up in a military family, and moving often, Kim has made London, Ontario her home for the past 30 years.

Billy Bert Young: Cloudburst is on view at Museum London until February 15, 2026. A graduate of the prestigious H.B. Beal Secondary School in 2002, Billy Bert Young also attended the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His practice has included drawing and design, zines, found object work, and murals. Billy will lead Paper Jam: Collage and Records, a creative experience at ML, on November 6.