“Please Wait.”, my thesis show, is comprised of art works that question institutional and cultural ideology. The installation and encompassed works derive from my experiences with doctors, hospitals, and countless waiting rooms. Framed as a medical waiting room in the gallery, the MFA Thesis show raises issues including the cultural conception of wellness, how we perform as patients, and how spaces intended to seem innocuous can harbor ideology. The threads that tie the thesis work together are my use of self as source and subject, my extrapolation of the personal to a social and political significance for others, my goal to complicate rather than solve or simplify issues, and a challenge to the notions of the normative, of authority, and of sociocultural presumptions that are harmful or limiting.
I have long been experiencing and researching waiting rooms in their many forms. I am interested in how they are intentionally forgettable spaces, programmed to be non-spaces for non-time, proscribing a very specific way of acting within them. I am now constructing waiting rooms, and am working on how to subvert the experience of waiting for a doctor in a gallery space. My thesis show is a waiting room installation including much of my previous work following and breaking some gallery and waiting room norms.
Recently I have shifted my focus from illness to wellness. I am interested in how images of wellness are constructed and propagated. Mythical, idealized, and surreal images in the media give a very narrow view of the possible faces of health. Research into the advertising of pharmaceuticals and health products led me to create a series of idealized Wellness Images, Wellness Videos, and IDYLIFY, a website as portal for critique.
Imagine if you could buy one of these at PartyMania! Inside are candies and vitamin packets, along with some free drug samples. It is hand crafted of the Health Section of The Washington Post, flour paste, and crepe paper. My physical involvement in the making of this object revealed important lessons on process. Much like with the pinhole camera, the direct reality of materials brings something pixels don’t. Direct physical engagement also implicates me as part and parcel of the thing. It is a labor of love. As such, I haven’t yet brought myself to orchestrate its destruction. Soon to come in video!
Update: Smashed! 3/18/10
In Fall 2008 I launched the website below using the internet as tactical media. It is a project that sets up an intimate transaction between strangers. It is a site-specific and event-specific art intervention that puts messages of hope and healing on toilets, hidden from view until someone lifts the seat to purge. The project aims to provide a enough of a rupture of the expectations in bulimic purging to introduce questions where there are usually imperatives, community where there is usually isolation, and hope where there is despair.
Sticker texts were submitted by members of an online recovery community. They include, “Don’t wait- Accept yourself now” and “What are your true passions?” The gifts of the project extend also beyond the experience for the person who discovers these messages on the toilets. The “Do it Ourselves” component empowers us to take action to help others and reinforce the powerful idea that recovery is possible. The website and text of the project hope to bring an often stigmatized issue to us in a compassionate light. This is where art has had a special role in my life and throughout history: art can offer an entry point into difficult, lonely territory and grant possibilities for positive transactions between people.
In September of 2007 I was walking on a sidewalk and was hit by a car and crushed against a building. I confronted time, trauma, and my body in videos about past and present issues. These include 13 Swallows, Of Two Minds, and Reclaiming Space. They focus on my experiences taking pills, dealing with an eating disorder, and with the accident itself. Above are stills from four of these videos.
My earlier graduate work, RIPRealty, foreshadows current work in the ways I use myself and humor in critiquing a social phenomenon. In that case, the phenomenon was the McMansionization of my neighborhood. I created myself as a Real Estate agent, made flyers and business cards, and began interviewing agents, builders, homeowners, and demolition crews. I would like to continue this work with relational aesthetics and the economic crisis in mind.
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.”