Rx

I am pleased to announce my first international exhibition, Rx, opens this Saturday, April 18th at IPS (In Plain Site) Gallerie in Montreal.

I wish I could afford to attend since its a three person show and meet the other two artists but that's the life of an artist. Constant sacrifice and disappointment.

I'm hoping to attract an international audience for my work. It always seems that European artists are much more in line with my aesthetic than most of my American peers.

A little about the show:

IPS is pleased to present Rx, featuring works by Chantal Gervais, Cindy Stelmackowich and Sarah Sudhoff.

April 18 – May 23, 2009
Vernissage -Saturday, April 18 3 p.m.
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Once the body has been deemed "ill", what was personal necessarily becomes public, beginning with the fact of the illness itself, which must be shared with medical professionals and others, and continuing with the invasive scrutiny of medical testing and the possible indignities of intervention.

The three artists whose photographs are featured in Rx work to control the representation of the self within the medical context, a context which has so often functioned to strip patients, particularly women, of agency. In constructing collages from MRI scans of her own body, including a re-gendered, technologically contemporary Vitruvian, Chantal Gervais willingly offers up what is ordinarily personal, interior and unseen, to the gaze of the viewer. The digital collages of Cindy Stelmackowich bring together lithographs that illustrated 19th-century anatomical atlases and illustrations of shipwrecks and other disasters from journals of the same era. In these re-colourized images, the internal torment the study of medicine may repress is returned to the patient, as cavities opened up for examination are made to reveal the panic and struggle within. Sarah Sudhoff began to produce self-portraits, films and performances in hospitals, morgues, medical museums and offices after undergoing surgery for cervical cancer in 2004. Her work focuses on the emotional as well as physical impact of illness, and includes images of the vulnerable body faced with the intractability of medical machinery, and of the residue of treatment on the flesh, and the sad beauty of medical waste.

Chantal Gervais is the recipient of the 2002 Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. She received an M.A. in Art and Media Practice from the University of Westminister in London, U.K., and teaches photography and media at the University of Ottawa.

Cindy Stelmackowich’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibits in both Canada and the U.S. She teaches art history at Carleton University, and her writings have appeared in numerous journals and publications.

Sarah Sudhoff, a Texas-based photographer who has exhibited internationally, is a founding board member for the Austin Center for Photography in Austin, Texas and was recently included in Hysteria: Past Yet Present at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.