(images: Intuitive X-Rays [close-up])
The series, Reports of Confirmation, confronts trusting your intuition while navigating a medical landscape that doesn’t want to believe you. Through this work, I am telling my personal story of not being believed to be sick. I am also acknowledging the psychological conflict it creates when patients are told their physical sensations don’t exist. This series synthesizes how intuitive experience can be validated when the power dynamic between scientific medical experts and patients are in play. This is told through materials that allude to the medical tests used to try to diagnose me. Referencing these medical tests through the size and shape of my work is an attempt to affirm my intuitive feelings using the methods of reporting deemed medically correct. Reports of Confirmation invites the viewer to consider the detached space you live in when you understand yourself to be the expert of your intuition, but lack the authority of the medical community attempting to give you a diagnosis.
The viewer encounters a cold room of optical caustic patterns, like the refracted light rays on the surface of water. The room is reminiscent of a medical examination room with familiar tools and white noise, which amplifies the sensations in the room that are unspoken. I am utilizing the optical caustic patterns I have generated in my past installation work as materialization of my intuition. The six prints, called Intuitive X-rays, are ways of visualizing my intuition when it pushed me to six instances of unease regarding my illness. Our intuition is there to protect us and guide us when navigating situations that don’t clearly pose a right or wrong solution. We are sometimes told to ignore these sensations, leading to unpleasant situations that harm our physical and emotional selves. These patterns come to be through chance and I capture them with a camera, immortalizing the pattern, as an x-ray does to the bone. They are printed to be the standard size of an x-ray [16”x 17”] on transparent paper. A light shines through this test to reveal the internal conflict of believing myself when I was told not to.
Contradicting Slides utilizes the standard dimensions of a microscope slide [1”x 3”] to elicit a call and response style conversation between the medical professionals and myself. The doctors’ dismissive comments and my affirming statements are laser etched onto the plexi-glass slides. The slides are presented unorganized on a metal table with two LED magnifying glasses and the audience can choose to hold them up to the examination light and find the matching contradictions. They may playfully arrange the permanent nature of the comments and perhaps trigger their own memories and internal rebuttals with similar power dynamics.
My Resonating Impression dissects and reimagines my personal MRI report to what it truly is--a series of lines using medical language confirming my suspicions of having a brain tumor. These lines of the report are seen dissected into, roughly, 1.0x 0.6x 0.6 cm chunks. These chunks are then taken and coated in hot glue and latex until they are molded to the appropriate dimensions of the tumor. This method both protects the report and destroys its medical professional legibility. Today, I’m able to read the report for what it’s truly worth.
In creating a series of work that discusses the medical dismissal of women I am inspired by the modern movements of candidly speak to about the injustices individuals have experienced in order to fuel change, such as the #MeToo Movement. One of the millennial art activists leading this discussion on medical dismissal in young adults is Beatrice Adler-Bolton. She is a mixed media artist who creates works out of plastics. Her practice is based around years of being misdiagnosed to ultimately receive the diagnosis of Chronic Relapsing Inflammatory Optic Neuritis, which will eventually make her blind. She also leads the “Death Panel” podcast, which talks about the young and sick. Writer, Susannah Cahalan, is also one to note as her autobiography “Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness” rose to popular culture in depicting the personal horrors she endured to reach the diagnosis of an autoimmune disease. I am also looking at the accounts of gender bias in medical diagnosis compiled by medical journalist and author Maya Dusenbery in her book “Doing Harm”.
Ellie Dent (1991-present) and Rebecca Horn (1944-present) are two artists which I align my artistic practice with as they have constructed work recontextualizing the medical experience under the lens of a patient. Ellie Dent, is a mixed media artist who works with “appropriated materials from hospitals to explore the themes of the body, the abject, pain, confession, and trauma”. Her series of sculptural work Nothing to Fear, Nothing to Doubt visualizes the blood, fluids, and organs of the body upon hospital materials and looks at how the physical body interacts with medical objects to provide a record of mistreatment. Rebecca Horn’s extensive collection of sculptural work, inspired by her year-long sanitorium stay, also informs my work. She constructs an intimate and detached sense of the medical patient through the sculptures she makes, like her 1970 work Overflowing Blood Machine. My current body of work could not be created without researching the history of women being silenced and institutionalized for expressing concerns about their physical and emotional well being. In the future growth of this work I wish to explore in more depth the history of hysteria diagnoses and how that thinking still holds weight within the modern doctor’s office.
My goal is to continue making work for women who have been and remain misdiagnosed due to ignorance, bias, and dismissive care. I hope that they can find a piece of their own story in my work. Through vulnerability, I intend to add to the call of action of believing that is just not “all in her head” and give these women a space to be heard and validated.