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curatorial statement

This year’s The Body Electric (TBE) digital art exhibit, Art as coping, Art as community in Healthcare, is closely aligned with the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada’s International Conference on Residency Education (ICRE) theme for 2022, Together Again: A Community Redefining Residency Education. And we are, indeed, together again! After two years of TBE focused on our online retrospective, it is wonderful to bring this exhibit back to the ICRE in Montreal, and to engage with colleagues about the vital role that the arts can play in sustaining us, in sustaining our connections, and building community within healthcare.

We invited artists working in areas related to health, wellbeing, and healthcare to submit works in response to three thematic areas: art as coping; art and community; and art and compassion. Works could be in any media, but are displayed digitally.

It was thrilling to see the response. Nineteen solo artists and one group submission were selected from entries from across Canada and international submissions. Artists working in a range of media, from video, to drawing, painting, sculpture, and digital arts, provided provocative reflections upon TBE’s theme.

Art as Coping
Many of the artists explicitly link their art practices to personal coping, particularly with the strains of covid-19 and with the global uncertainties that the pandemic exposed. The title of Rosemary Burd’s submission, ‘where can we find light in this never-ending shade?’ is an invocation to the arts to be a source of both inspiration and illumination.
In their submission, Pandemic Convergence, Elaine Whittaker (Canada) examines the “beauty and fear of non-human life as our environment becomes even more fragile from globalization and Climate Change in this unsettling time of contagions.” Their daily practice of drawing supports coping with their own medical condition and with the pandemic. They describe “art as coping, science as beauty.”
Asal Andarzipour (Canada) in Polaroid Polyptich No. 01 embraces the opportunity of the pandemic and of isolation, intersecting with their own qualities of “fragility and uncertainty,” in a reflective practice of photography. Jordan Synder (Canada), in Cloak of Mirrors, creates a mirrored cloak with their art, an armament that reflects and deflects “the ideas that others have of us,” and the weight of carrying these projections, particularly as an Indigenous person.
Several of the artists are medical trainees and healthcare researchers and practitioners who engage with the arts to complement their clinical and research experiences. Rabab Alabdullah (Canada), a postgraduate year 3 surgery resident, describes that drawing has always been a way “where my mind can relax and my emotions express themselves without thinking or calculation… how art can take someone from place of chaos to a place of quiet and serenity,” a process that can be witnessed in their submission Breather.
Andrea Charise (Canada), a health humanities researcher, and also a jury member for TBE, views creation as an opportunity to be “in conversation with each unique ceramic object.” Their submission, Incipient, was created amid the Covid-19 pandemic, a “vital materialization of my own artistic practice as a technology of coping in these times.”
Those who identify as people with living experience of healthcare also capture the potentiality of art as a coping and meaning-making practice that contributes to their wellbeing.
Jake Bowen (Canada) views art as a vehicle for self-discovery as they navigate their mental health. Matt Ferguson (Canada) in Corporeality approaches art with a “continuing compulsion to create” following an injury to their dominant hand to explore and contain uncertainty and feelings of fear and inadequacy. Both Heather Huston (Canada), in her piece Interruption, and
Lia Pas, in paresthesias, embrace art as a means of expressing the often inexpressible burden of chronic illness, and of coping with it. Pas explains her practice of embroidery as an exercise in naming and cataloguing her sensation, and as a meditative, soothing practice.

Art as community
While many of the artists reflect upon the potential of art to alleviate the stress, uncertainty and isolation of the pandemic, others celebrate the capacities of art to create community. Jared Boechler (Canada), in A Nearly Empty Room, explicitly describes their art as a means to “challenge views of loneliness and isolation.”
The beautiful repetition of pattern in Monique Martin’s Tears Over Time simulates movement and interconnectedness, “like a pebble in a pond, the rings of energy keep moving outward from the initial touch, whether it is physical, emotional or mental.” The piece is an instantiation of action in life, whereby “every interaction produces an energy that vibrates within the world and connects humans to each other and to the environment.”
Returning to TBE, artist Talysha Bujold-Abu shares their NEIGHBOUR SERIES, whimsical drawings that attest to the importance of community, and of the conflation of our selves-as-isolated-houses during the pandemic. They reflect in their artist’s statement on practice as collecting – bringing together in one body or place, gathering, accumulating, and finding. Art practice itself is a community-building activity of gathering the inferences and associations of community and culture.
Where Bujold-Abu uses whimsy and drawings, Anna Harris, Kaisu Koski, Noémie Soula, Anne van Veen (United Kingdom; Netherlands), the Citizen Surgery Collective, use the bizarre as a field of exploration in Lunchtime Surgery Class. The communal, everyday act of lunch time becomes a way to approach surgical practices in a new light. As with their other installations and research their video explores the relationship between (non)human animal bodies and food.
Art as compassion

All of the art in this exhibit may be viewed and reflected on in relation to compassion, particularly compassion and its absence in healthcare. Several of the works brings us into relation with the feeling landscape of the artist. Kathryn Huckson’s (Canada) SOAP Poems, for example, engages with “sentimentality, melancholy, disturbance, disorder, loss, and fear…in an attempt to reach others in its awkward honesty.” And in their striking work Remnants, Jackie Partridge (Canada) uses the found objects of their grandfather’s work denim to honor what can and cannot be known of another person’s history and lived experience.
Laura Kay Keeling (Canada), in When It Gets Dark, I Have Shallow Breath, negotiates a new relationship with land and space following a traumatic event, and “explores how we form connections with each other and nature,” suggesting art as a place to work out “what the relationship of caring for each looks like.” Similarly, in Mending, Molly Moldovan (Canada) depicts the healing of emotional wounds through art, which marking these scars as the source of art itself.
Works by Lindsay-Ann Chilcott (Canada), Perception: A Curse, and Kaisu Koski (United Kingdom), HUG, speak directly to new forms of compassion and its disruption that emerge in our navigation of social life across technologies. As Chilcott writes, “Coronavirus has forced a wide-spread reliance on technology, escalating anxiety issues and social media addiction.” And Koski’s speculative garment HUG “explores the capacity of technology to respond to human tactile deprivation by creating the sensation of a hug without the presence of another person.”
“… who am I when my technological counterparts have been stripped away?,” is the question that Chilcott leaves us with.
The artists in this show expose the nerves that have been stripped bare by life over the course of the pandemic, and as we emerge and re-explore our social connections these artists help us to make sense of these new individual and collective experiences. The pain and wounds we may have experienced can also become new aptitudes and sensitivities that can heighten our awareness of our interconnectedness.

I am deeply grateful to the compassionate community formed by TBE, and supported by the Royal Collage of Canada and ICRE. Thank you to the artists who contributed their work, to the jury who selected a spectacular collection of work, and a special thank you to Katie Switzer and Chantalle Clarkin for their curatorial assistance, and to co-curator Lisa Richardson.

Allison Crawford
Montreal, 2022

Artists

Artist Statement

Being a surgical resident can be very busy and stressful, drawing has always been a way where my mind can relax and my emotions express themselves without thinking or calculation. “Breather” done by Procreat App on iPad Pro and iMovie it represent how art can take someone from place of chaos to a place of quiet and serenity.

Artist’s Biography

PGY3, General Surgery at McGill University. Drawing is hobby where there is constant exploration of different mediums, main interests are: ink, watercolor and recently digital art.

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Artist Statement

I take my polaroids with a vintage SX-70 camera. Accidents play an important role in the development of each photo. Fragility and uncertainty are inevitable qualities of both myself and this practice. My journey of exploring the psyche-body has been a coincidence with this era of covid and isolation. Most photos capture my solitary indoor times in the daylight. I welcome influence from Robert Mapplethorpe and Francesca Woodman.

Artist’s Biography

Originally from Tehran, Iran, Asal Andarzipour is based in Edmonton, Alberta. Her studio practice in analog photography and oil painting explores themes of trauma and identity.

Since immigrating to North America in 2015, she has served in non-profit arts organizations in New York and Alberta. Asal holds a BFA from the University of Tehran, an MFA from Syracuse University, and an MA in History of Art, Design and Visual Culture from the University of Alberta.

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Artist Statement

Using traditional methods in sharp contemporary context, Boechler’s work challenges views of loneliness and isolation with an often subtle execution, resulting in works depicting circumstances that are at once banal and dramatic. 

Artist’s Biography

Jared Boechler is a contemporary visual artist based out of Canada. He works and exhibits internationally, including New York, Asia, and Europe. He has recently been awarded working fellowships at Art Biotop, Japan, Serlachius Museum, Finland, and Sheen Center for Thought + Culture in New York, USA. Boechler was recently recognized at the Governor General History Awards for his work, presided over by the Honourable Governor General of Canada. Boechler’s most significant exhibition to date paired custom-designed scents alongside the original oil paintings they inspired. The olfactory element attached to this body of work introduced a largely new method of working in the world of contemporary art; a process led by scent influence. His current practice involves the use of traditional, installation, and olfactory art. 

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Artist Statement

The art that I create is inspired by a desire for self-discovery with influences from my relationship with my tumultuous mental health. I strive to utilize every possible colour in my work. The process usually begins with an expressionistic movement across the canvas. The shape grows and shifts until a final product reveals itself. The ever changing nature of my process exemplifies how my perception of the world changes on a daily basis.

Artist’s Biography

I am a surrealist painter born in Brantford, ON and now based out of Montréal, QC. I began my artist journey with photography, which lead to me studying Image Arts at the University of Guelph-Humber. I began taking paint to canvas in 2019 after branching away from photography. As a self-taught artist I am unencumbered by restricting rules of classically taught painters. I strive to appeal to the inner child within each viewer.

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Artist Statement

In practice, there is one word, collecting: 

a) bringing together into one body or place
b) to gather or extract
c) to accumulate
d) infer, to find, deduce
 

Artist’s Biography

Talysha Bujold-Abu (she/her) is an illustrator, cultural administrator, and writer – she holds a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Windsor (2018) and is recipient of the Conundrum Press Mini-Comic Bursary for Black and Indigenous Creators (2021).

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Artist Statement

In February 2020, I started stitching a tangled mess of thread and trim to a piece of linen, not knowing where it might lead. Each stitch was a stab at coping with uncertainty, a repetitive action that calmed the eddies of illness and elder care that swirled through my life. Since then, stitching has become my artistic practice, equal parts exploration and meditation.

Artist’s Biography

Rosemary Burd is a mixed media and textile artist who works with repurposed fabrics, found objects, threads, and photographs in her stitched artworks. Rosemary’s textile piece, ‘where can we find light in this never-ending shade?’, was published in the Surface Design Association’s Exhibitions in Print, (Fall, 2021), and exhibited at the Eastside Culture Crawl’s juried exhibit at the Pendulum Gallery, Vancouver (November, 2021).

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Artist Statement

My sculptural work explores abstract, coil-built forms, ornamented with innovative, experimental glaze formulas I develop in conversation with each unique ceramic object. “Incipient,” created amid the COVID-19 pandemic, draws its inspiration from medicine’s wordstock, evoking the profound ambiguities of becoming: from the emergence of a mass epidemiological event; to individualized symptoms of respiratory distress, damage, and failure; to the vital materialization of my own artistic practice as a technology of coping in these times.

Artist’s Biography

Andrea Charise (she/her) is an artist-researcher working in ceramics, narrative, and digital media. A recent graduate of Fleming College’s Ceramics Certificate Program, Charise received the Haliburton School of Art + Design’s 2022 Ceramics Award. She now produces functional and sculptural ceramic ware as SQUARED CIRCLE CERAMICS, and is currently Biophilium Artist-in-Residence at the Ayatana Artists’ Research Program (Spring/Fall 2022). Her creative works have been featured in group exhibitions in Canada, Belgium, and online.

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Artist Statement

Perception: A Curse, is a mixed media painting focusing on the boundary between science fiction and social reality, while dealing with themes of materialism and perception. Coronavirus has forced a wide-spread reliance on technology, escalating anxiety issues and social media addiction. Copper wires and a circuit board symbolize society’s craving for online recognition. This artwork contemplates the need for self-awareness and poses the question: who am I when my technological counterparts have been stripped away?

Artist’s Biography

Lindsay-Ann Chilcott is a multimedia artist from Niagara Falls, Ontario, specializing in surrealism. Through many different mediums, she enjoys working with a variety of experimental medias such as oil painting, sculpture, and upcycling. Lindsay’s work is often inspired by themes of psychology, popular culture, and the uncanny, and her work has been displayed in many group and solo exhibitions throughout the Niagara Region.

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Artist Statement

My work focuses on materiality and the relationship between form and function. Through my continuing compulsion to create art following the uncertainty surrounding an injured dominant hand, I seek to explore, understand, and reflect personal feelings of fear and inadequacy. My subjects are corporeal; by referencing anatomical diagrams and industrial schematics I parallel their organic elements with synthetic materials, which is an attempt at conveying subject matter with an almost universal quality.

Artist’s Biography

Born in 1988 in Barrie, ON, Canada, Matthew Ferguson spent his early/adolescent years exploring his passion to create as a self-taught artist; this led him to study at Brock University where he graduated with a BA (3 year) in Fine Art. Though his early career was mired by an injured dominant hand, this hurdle only internalized within him a greater understanding for the resilience and reverence required to create art at a professional level.

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Artist Statement

The operation room lights shine brightly in four surgical theatres. The class is connected remotely in this simultaneous surgical lesson. The teacher calls for the instruments needed: “the blade!”. Four multicoloured gloves in four different screens pick up sharp instruments – wait, are they kitchen knives? “Tweezers!” Are they eyelash curlers? The surgery continues, virtually, synchronically, the screens focus on the body part being operated on. Until the bizarre last step…

Artist’s Biography

Citizen Surgery Collective (Kaisu Koski, Noémie Soula, Anne van Veen, Anna Harris). The Citizen Surgery Collective was initiated in 2020 by Kaisu Koski, as an interdisciplinary practice-based research group consisting of artists, critical posthumanists and anthropologists. Their work concerns surgical literacy, sensory skills acquisition, simulation, and the relationship between (non)human animal bodies and food.

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Artist Statement

Katie Huckson is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice engages with sentimentality, melancholy, disturbance, disorder, loss, and fear. Often her work is motivated by a struggle to control, or a perpetual sense of longing for something lost and/or unattainable. She draws from deeply personal experiences, insecurities, and memories in an attempt to reach others in its awkward honesty. Traditionally trained in painting and drawing her practice lately tends towards digital practices, collage, and performance.

Artist’s Biography

Katie Huckson has a BFA from Algoma University and an MFA from the University of Windsor in 2017. She has exhibited, screened, and performed her work across Canada and abroad, including in Colorado, Italy, Greece, and Vietnam. Her video, Normal Disorders, won Best Picture at the Lights, Camera, Take Action Film Festival at the University of Colorado in 2018. In 2019 she was invited to perform at Occupy the Kitchen Volume 2 in Italy.

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Artist Statement

While much of our knowledge of illness is framed through the biomedical context, my work centers affect and the performance of daily life as significant sites of meaning in understanding chronic illness. Living with chronic illness means that much of my time is spent attending appointments and a lot of my mental energy is spent worrying about progression and test results. Interruption depicts this ongoing medical disruption to daily life and the body.

Artist’s Biography

Heather Huston is an Associate Professor of Print Media at the Alberta University of the Arts where she enjoys indoctrinating students into the cult of printmaking. Her work is situated in the medical humanities and she is an active member of the Health Humanities at the University of Calgary. She has exhibited her printmaking work throughout North America and internationally. Her work sits in the collections of over fifteen major institutions.

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Artist Statement

 In 2018, a traumatic accident occurred at a place I have spent my whole life visiting which led me to think about our connections to place while at the same time, grappling with the fact that somewhere I loved and was very connected to, was now also the site of such a tragedy. I created this work in response, during a time of grief and healing.

Artist’s Biography

Laura Kay Keeling (she/her/they) is a self-taught visual artist whose work encompasses analog photography/video, collage and installation-based projects. Her artwork explores how we form connections with each other and nature. She continues to think about and explore concepts relating to reciprocal care and how one might engage and interact with other humans, plants / animals, and nature as well as what the relationship of caring for each looks like.

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Artist Statement

The speculative garment HUG explores the capacity of technology to respond to human tactile deprivation by creating the sensation of a hug without the presence of another person. It is made of recycled air cushions (lock-down) and infuse bags and can be used independently or with a friend. It has two airbags, one on the chest and one between the shoulder plates. HUG is the first prototype in a project exploring affective health technology.

Artist’s Biography

Kaisu Koski is a cross-disciplinary artist with a background in performance and screen-based media. She is an associate professor of art and design at Sheffield Hallam University. Kaisu’s work explores climate crisis, human-nonhuman relationships, and empathy, and it involves collaboration with scientists, clinicians, and engineers. She has conducted research fellowships in various medical schools and created films for medical curricula on topics such as vaccine-hesitancy and breaking bad news.

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Artist Statement

Every action in life, every interaction produces an energy that vibrates within the world and connects humans to each other and to the environment. Like a pebble in a pond, the rings of energy keep moving outward from the initial touch, whether it is physical, emotional or mental. It is in responding to these every-changing ripples in the connections between humans and the environment that informs my work.

Artist’s Biography

Monique is a multi-disciplinary artist from Saskatoon, Canada with a 25-year exhibition history and more than 270 significant solo, invited and juried group exhibitions in eleven countries. Over 50 of these exhibitions were solos in public galleries. Renowned international curators have selected her artwork for various exhibitions worldwide. Her artwork has been supported with grants from Canada Council for the Arts, Saskatchewan Arts Board and Creative Saskatchewan.

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Artist Statement

No matter how I tried, I couldn’t make this piece “pretty.”  It kept coming back to how I see the state of the world at this time, how bruised and wounded it is, and how our attempts to fix things… unravel.  But, beneath the wounds and the scarring, lies the best of human nature, the core that becomes art.  Here, it is represented by gold leaf.

Artist’s Biography

I work in an intuitive, instinctive manner, immersed in the moment. Colour is always my starting point, the most important element of my work. The resulting paintings are vibrant and emotive, mediated snapshots of memory, places and things existing only in my imagination. Working in acrylic and mixed media on various substrates, recent work has explored such diverse themes as democracy, living with cancer, climate change, and, always, the abstract nature of our universe.

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Artist Statement

Using my retired grandfather’s farm clothing I used the seams of the clothing to create a drawing of emptiness. These remnants will be all that is left when he is gone. Hanging onto the belongings of a loved one can be a way of coping a loss. It’s hard to imagine what will remain when we are gone.

Artist’s Biography

Jackie Partridge is a mixed media artist working with handmade paper, recycled maps and objects living in Wellesley, ON, Canada. Her work often explores themes of memory and the landscape. She graduated from Concordia University in 2018, in the Fibres and Material Practices Program. She has exhibited work across Canada in solo and group exhibitions. You can view more of her art installations here: www.jackiepartridge.com

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Artist Statement

I am a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores embodied states through text, image, and sound. Since becoming disabled by chronic illness in 2015, I have created a series of embroideries exploring my invisible symptoms, stitching the sensations freehand as I experience them. This allows me to cope more easily with my symptoms, turning what is disturbing into a meditative art practice. These paresthesia pieces from my symptomatology series explore the neurological sensations of tingling. 

Artist’s Biography

Lia Pas is a Saskatoon-based multidisciplinary artist who works in image, text, and sound exploring body and states of being. She focused on performance-based work until 2015 when she became disabled with a chronic illness and now her main practice is in fibre arts. 

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Artist Statement

This piece is about how we try to protect ourselves. We use armor. We present ourselves in others’ ideas for us. This is especially true for Indigenous Peoples. What you cannot see from looking at this piece is how heavy it is. It is heavy to carry the perceptions and expectations of others.

Artist’s Biography

Jordan Snyder identifies as:

• An emerging artist, writer, and filmmaker
• A non-status First Nations woman
• A matrilineal descendent of Deninu Kue First Nation
• A neurodiverse brain

She was born in Edmonton, she attended high school in the Pacific Northwest, she made her first attempts at higher education in Journalism at the College of Charleston and English Literature at Texas State University until finally after 11 years well spent in the higher education system she came through with a BFA in Integrated Media from OCAD University.

Jordan enjoys long walks on the beach, subversive text, and 4:4:4 chroma subsampling.

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Artist Statement

As a visual artist working at the intersection of art, science, medicine, and ecology, my artworks examine the beauty and fear of non-human life as our environment becomes even more fragile from globalization and Climate Change in this unsettling time of contagions. To cope with the pandemic, while undergoing surgery and cancer treatments, I turned to a daily practice of drawing microbes and cellular bodies: art as coping, science as beauty.

Artist’s Biography

I am a Canadian visual artist working at the intersection of art, science, medicine, and ecology. I have exhibited in art and science galleries and museums nationally and internationally, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. I have created artworks in collaboration with scientists at the Pelling Laboratory for Augmented Biology (University of Ottawa) and was one of the first Artists-in-Residence with the Ontario Science Centre.