Gwynneth VanLaven

I have been going armed with my pinhole camera home-made of a recycled SPAM can, to the site where I was hit nearly two years ago by a man in a Lincoln town car. The perpetrator has since died.  Standing where I had been walking that morning, looking at a SPAM can taped to a tripod where he would have been, feels absurd.  This absurdity gives me distance to feel safe to be both playful and reflective.

The fact of being recorded by a pinhole, with its long exposures, gives me time to feel like I am dialoguing with the hitter, channeling him from the dead, or bringing him out of the trance that he had been in when he hit me over and over again. The long exposure times also allow for me to be silly, angry, determined, scared, angry, and resilient, all in one exposure. The process is liberating rather than capturing. If a traditional camera “freezes” an action in time and space, so too does an “accident” or trauma. Part of me feels like I’m left there in space and time, and when I revisit the space I feel frozen in the face of it, unable to avoid Him and The Car that are ghosts but frozen in full flesh and color in my memory. I want to be un-frozen, and the pinhole helps do that.

While there I imagine he is in that silly box, a piece of flimsy film, a latent image, impressionable to my every move. I imagine the light that bounces off me could hit him and tell him something of my experience of that fateful encounter, that “accident.”  There is something in the process, an uncertainty, that is liberating too. It mirrors and confirms my own healing process, I suppose. I have no idea whether he knows, somewhere in the afterlife, that he has hurt me nor that I am determinedly slinking back.

As in much of my work, I use myself to examine cultural assumptions.  The culture around medicine maintains certain lofty ideals by which “wellness” is measured. Through this video I hope to complicate that ideal of wellness.  For this instance, perhaps it is some state or condition that we settle for in the face of no perfect alternatives.  What is your measure of therapeutic success?

When I think of what wellness would look like for me, in conscious and subconscious thought, I run through the cadre of marketing images I have eaten up in magazines and TV sets in waiting rooms, on tissue boxes and clipboards and pamphlets. There I find a recurring and visually striking theme of devotion, surrender, and reverence.  I found over and over in my research ads with a person in a familiar posture. The recurrent pose of both arms outstretched, palms out, head lifted, has been common in religious art of both ancient and Christian faiths. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this pose is called the Orant, a gesture used during prayer, painted in icons, and attached to sarcophagi of seekers of salvation.

Certainly this pose conjures of feelings of devotion. Additionally, it is a posture of praise, of exuberance, reverence, and waiting. It is a pose of dissociation. The offset, distant gazes and surrendering body posture imply an otherness. The other may be the authority of the medical establishment. We are asked to believe in the salvation medicine promises such that we open our bodies and hearts in posture and action. In this posture of surrender, we are offering ourselves while banishing critical judgment which might otherwise question the authority of the pharmaceutical and its claims. We surrender our questioning of the acculturated ideals of wellness.

In the images are a Sweet Wellness cake I had at the opening of my MFA show, a curtain that divided the space between waiting rooms and exam rooms, with 20 feet of wellness poses from actual ad campaigns, the X-ray lit images of my doctors who have taken the pose for my camera, and a group of visitors to my MFA show doing their versions of the “wellness pose.”