We would like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is the traditional territory of Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples.
The Body Electric understands art as an intervention that explores, disrupts, deepens and reimagines medicine. It offers a set of practices for meaning-making, looking, and reflecting through which we can stand in new relations with the subjects and objects of health care.
« Le corps électrique » considère l’art comme une intervention qui explore, perturbe, approfondit et réinvente la médecine. L’exposition propose une série de pratiques visant la signification et la réflexion afin d’en venir à une nouvelle relation avec les sujets et les objets des soins de santé. »
Download our interactive, and bilingual program/ Téléchargez notre programme interactif et bilingue:
Artists
Alexandre Coutin, Groonie Tang,
and Laurence Biro
Our work strives to facilitate inclusion and improve quality of care for LGBTQ patients by providing a holistic understanding of their identities. We created an LGBTQ Health infographic to teach medical learners gender and sexual diversity concepts.
Raven Crow
The Medicine Wheel has many teachings within it. It helps us to honour the four nations: Yellow, Red, Black and White people. The Medicine Wheels within our being help us to see clearly, to speak our truth and to sense the world around us. I added my own teachings with the blue colour representing father sky and the water beings.
Dr. C. Michael Gibson
The hopes and capacity for self-healing on the part of the patient, and the compassion and “placebo effect” offered by the shaman have now been replaced by the indifferent potent drugs of the physician scientist. When modern medicine fails, sometimes a long arm, either your own, that of a loved one, that of a healer or love and forgiveness themselves reach down and pull you out of the dust bin of the void; and a soul is redeemed and healed.
Amy Jeffreys
This piece has come to be a result of loss, and the melancholic thoughts following. The theme compassion relates to my pieces as they evoke an emotional response from the audience that triggers a recollection of a personal experience with loss. I strive to have the viewer respond to my own suffering by extending an understanding of this experience and therefore lending compassion.
Annie Kei
My project is a visual exploration of the “Gut-Brain Axis” research, a field in medicine which has only gained popularity in recent years. It ties closely to this year’s ICRE theme “Advancing Quality: Aligning Residency Education and Patient Care”, as my project reaches out to the notion of caring for patients beyond using only pharmaceutical products and traditional clinical methods.
Dr. Yi Ariel Liu
I believe that developing a genuine curiosity for the patient’s wellbeing and reason for presenting can help us overcome counter-transference. The brain that emerges from the patient in the painting shows that there can be many things that the patient is thinking about that are hidden from the physician during a clinical encounter.
Elizabeth M. Lopez
A thread in my work follows the destruction and loss from dementia. I am intrigued by impermanence; the passage of time, inevitable damage, decay and change, and the relativity of existence.
Bryn A. Ludlow
The contrasts between time, degradation of the brain represented by ellipses as Amyloid plaques covering the time, and experience of grief, are addressed in my two pieces about dementia and loss. By sharing my vulnerable experience of grief in the painting, I hope it is evident that the technique of sweeping brush lines in the figure, and background, expresses the experience of letting go the grief that I felt when creating
this work.
Marilyn Mitchell
This painting relates to aligning Residency education and patient care since it is about how even the most fragile people contain something inexplicable when they are alive. We know it most intensely when a person dies. Whatever it was that gave them life is suddenly gone. This painting is meant to depict the moment this man’s life left him. He was a real patient of mine and I intentionally made him vague in order to protect his identity.
Hesam Noroozi
Turn the patients’ attention to the moment, to the brighter side, and let him/her acknowledge the entire emotions and thoughts. In some mood disorders, psychotherapy can help patients to deal better with their emotions and thoughts.
Ansel Oommen
The body and its organ systems comprise a lush, corporeal garden that grows, blooms, and senesces along a natural cycle. At any given season of their life, an individual will experience periods of invigoration and decline. Central to the vitality of a garden, however, is careful design and cultivation. In this sense, the physician acts as master gardener by being in tune with the earth.
Wendy Palmer
WINGS is one of thirty pairings of photographs and imagist poems in the exhibition “Edges of Light: Images of Breast Transformation”. A collaborative effort between photographer Wendy Palmer and subject/author Dr. Kimberly Myers, the exhibition chronicles Myers’s journey with breast cancer from diagnosis through reconstruction.
Dr. Julien Poitras
Julien Poitras, vice-doyen à la responsabilité sociale à la Faculté de médecine de l’Université Laval, médecin d’urgence au CHAU de Lévis et bachelier en Arts visuels, fait de la bande dessinée et opère une petite maison d’édition, Moelle graphique.
Catherine Richards
Catherine Richards is a visual artist working with new and old technologies. Her work explores the volatile sense of ourselves as new information technologies shift
our boundaries.
Pauline Sameshima
The beauty of the journey (the flowering foliage) as evidenced by the participants, is self-created—this flowing journey of joyful moments reflects resiliency and hope created through support and outlook. The shadow on the winter trees is created with the Sanskrit Maha Mrityanjaya Mantra which encourages the recognition of an evolving self and the new possibilities that recognition brings.
Dayna Slingerland, and Pauline Sameshima
Dayna Slingerland and Pauline Sameshima from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario created “Dandelion Hopes” as a collaborative, arts integrated research art piece. The work celebrates a process of making as well as the final product.
Lesia Szyca
My work deconstructs traditional images of death by taking them out of their intended context and exploring their components. In particular, I explore beauty in its ties to death and the macabre of preservation.
Claire Tatangelo
In this installation, I explore what it means to understand my whole, integrated self by studying anatomy, reflecting on memories, and visually depicting somatic experience. Collectively, these pieces are my perception of how the mind and body are connected. Images inspired by human thought, emotion, and form have the power to stimulate insight and empathy towards others.
Samantha Theriault
The intention of the piece is to represent the historical origin of scientific research and education. As a practicing Registered Nurse specializing in Cardiology, I use artistic renditions to commit anatomy to memory.
Laura Thipphawong
My interdisciplinary research, writing, and art practice centers around the critical theory of violence, sexuality, folklore, science, and the abject image in cultural media.
Emily Thurston
This series is truly about the body as opposed to the individual within the frame. The body is used as a key, or a tool in each selected environment. The environments have surreal qualities to them; allowing the position of the body within them to confuse a person and take them away from the mundane aesthetics a female body has historically been photographed in. The body begins to create a dialogue with the earth, a reaction
of escapism.
Cristina Vidrutiu
Cristina Vidrutiu is a Research Fellow of the Art, Science and Business Program, at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, working on an interdisciplinary project on Illness narratives (narrative research and art installation).
Jinke Wang
These paintings are assignments from Dr. Stephen Tulk’s Human Anatony class and Jon Todd’s class at OCAD University. With reference to George Bridgmans’ anatomy drawings, I sought to express the power and aesthetics of muscle that lies beneath our skin, and works as precise as a clock.