ART GALLERY OF REGINA

The artists in Care reveal the unknown, the ignored and the unseen: internal anatomy, viruses, dreams, memories and pain. Karishma Joshi and Tea Gerbeza use their transformed bodies and medical tests as raw materials for their artworks.

 

Joshi's Lines of Sorrow is like a perverse advent calendar, each transparent pouch stuffed with that day's fallen hair, their accumulation a vivid demonstration of the unrelenting nature of her illness. A 100-micron-wide human hair fittingly symbolizes how women's health issues, such as Polycystic ovary syndrome, are trivialized. PCOS can cause infertility, balding, weight gain, and increased facial hair, all of which diminish a woman's perceived value. As a South Asian woman, Joshi is aware of the value her cultural background places on long, luxurious locks as signifiers of a woman's femininity, desirability and fitness.  ​

 

Gerbeza, a poet, coils paper, contorting the material into a visceral language of pain. Gerbeza's collage and paper-quilled works, Bedscapes, depict the bed as an ambivalent landscape, representing rest, recovery, pleasure, sickness, pain, and isolation. In some collages, Gerbeza assembles the downy forms of pillows and mattresses from the rigid lengths of used diabetes test strips, demonstrating how bed and health are entangled with a sense of self, especially for Gerbeza and other queer, disabled and chronically ill artists.​

 

George Glenn and collaborators Karlie King and Ashley Johnson take the confusing and dehumanizing machinations of the medical system as their subject matter.

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Glenn's paintings and drawings are diagrams that trace a route through childhood homes and hospital Polio wards, overlaid with nightmare architecture. The re-emergence of the dormant Polio virus in the artist's body coincided with the reawakening of long-forgotten memories of infantile paralysis, surgeries, and hospitalizations – the subject of his work.

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Johnson, who lives with a congenital heart condition, and King seek to reveal the unknowable interior of our bodies through their multisensory installation, The Moving Heart. King's clay hearts are deliberately imperfect yet invitingly tactile. Visitors can hold them, feeling the ceramic warm in their hands, in response to poetic instructions or free experiential anatomy workshops by Johnson. The Moving Heart considers the heart from physical and metaphorical perspectives: the heart determines our mortality and encases our deep longings.​

 

The word "care" is ambiguous, constantly mutating, encompassing worry, fondness, and maintenance. We can care about illness, disability and decline without being defined by or defining others by it.