curatorial statement

At times when you think art is not a priority, when the world is in upheaval, when things are shattered, when survival matters, art is most essential. We turn to art to find ourselves, find our voices, find points of connection, and tools for resistance.

This year The Body Electric looked to the ICRE 2023 theme, From Caring For Patients to Protecting Our Planet: Advocacy in Residency Education, and invited artists to approach the theme of advocacy broadly, and to consider advocacy from various experiential and critical vantages, including:

• Art as / for advocacy
• Art, advocacy, patients, healthcare providers
• Art and planetary health

The artists in this year’s show use their art to expose accepted truths, make us look anew, and suggest new relations with practice, with patients, and with our communities and environments. These three phases of advocacy – appraising, re-visioning, action – are captured in the three stanzas of Langston Hughes’s poem “I look at the world.”

Appraising…exposing “truth”

I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space   
Assigned to me.

                    Langston Hughes
                    “I look at the world”

All of the artists in this show make us reconsider what we know, and how we see, and represent the inanimate, human, and natural environments we intersect with. Many of the artists explicitly upend our authority and challenge our sense of responsibility and our ethics. Filmmaker Niya Abdullahi calls her art a “window of awareness.” Kathryn Huckson’s series Taken, replaced literally re-frames colonial relations with the land. As a person of mixed European and Métis ancestry she uses her art to “confronts my complicated relationship to this land…” and her act of re-framing “mimics processes of resource extraction and hollow gestures of giving back.”  

Re-visioning…looking anew

I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face—
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!

Langston Hughes
“I look at the world”

Rose Adams exploits a 60-day trial period to make us look differently at Alzheimer’s disease, while Hannah Laycock, an artist living with multiple sclerosis, uses art to explore beyond the terrain of language. Kelly Aitken uses a technique of pastel/erasure drawing in order to re-orient our visual experience, to evoke loss due to Covid-19.

Megan Landes approaches her artmaking as a direct way of reflecting upon her medical practice as an academic emergency physician; her drawings are taken from her series Attending and allow both herself, and in turn the viewer, a lingering gaze upon scenes from the “frontline” of healthcare during a time of upheaval.  Savita Rani, in Approaches to Handling Difficult Emotion, also creates a space that invites an introspective response from the viewer and is particularly oriented towards those who engage with the intense experiences of others in clinical practice.

Jennifer Long in her series Mended Leaves approaches art as a meditative exploration. A sense of time, caregiving, and patience pervades her work. Christine Pedersen’s metal sculptures “Where Do The Waves Come From?” also induce a meditative quality to reflect on energy and conservation, both of the oceanic and the human. Kathleen Troy uses eco-friendly materials Japanese paper and paper rope in “Paper Vertebratin” as a testament to the power of art to transform biodegradable materials into art that “invites reflection on nature’s inherent value and interconnectedness between human health and the environment.”

delio delgado explores things unseen in SantoAtomo, while Nadine Chantal Leclerc, in her digital bricolage From 66 High Street to 2099,asks us to see into the future at the scene of a new pandemic.

Faye Fayerman, through her photography, also attempts to capture the invisible/visible. In her colorful photograph Bute Steet, the riot of colour and shapes almost distracts the eye from the human asleep on the sidewalk, invisible under our gaze.

Action…imagining new relations

I look at my own body   
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that’s in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.

Langston Hughes
            “I look at the world”

While critically re-appraising, and seeing anew are essential acts of advocacy arising directly from art, and from the practices of artmaking, many of the artists in the this year’s TBE also use art to position new relations and new engagements with the self, others, and both our built and natural environments.

Roberto Santaguida says of his work, The Universe According to Dan Buckley, that he wants to use his art “to bring marginalized groups back to the agora.” Similarly, through her filmmaking, a direct response to the stories of her community, Niya Abdullahi has the viewer relate to her visions of liberation and resistance. In “Walkers,” Shaughn Martel purposely mis-uses (mis-presents, mis-relates) software to present moving images in new ways.

Ingrid Bachmann’s submission, taken from her multidisciplinary research and artistic project Hybrid Bodies, explores the complexities of organ transplantation and the new relations it creates between personal identity and the relationship between organ recipients and their donors.  Asma Sultana’s relation to her art is bold and visceral; she literally stitches her biology into her art in Letter to My Unborn Child.

Sandra Gregson, in her paintings Restore and Mother Tree, investigates “the interplay of connections between natural and built environments” and imagines the natural world as active and resilient. Clara Laratta’s sculpture Towards Wholeness is constructed from the belief that individual healing is tied to collective and planetary healing. The spherical frame holds a poem considering the relationship between individual and planetary health while invisible string holds items used to heal the body, bringing them into connection.

We hope that this year’s TBE allows you to see different and find new points of connection as you reflect on yourself, community, and environment, perhaps even finding a new vantage for advocacy.

There is no stronger group of advocates that The Body Electric jury!  Thank you so much to this year’s jury, including longstanding members Lisa Richardson (co-curator), Chantalle Clarkin (Associate Curator), Andrea Charise, Max Montalvo, and to new jury members Bryn Ludlow and Candace Couse.

Thank you also to the incredible artists who are the heart and force of TBE and thank you to the support of video editor Sara Wilde, and to ICRE Scientific Chair, Dr. Adelle Atkinson, for your longstanding support, and Dr. Lyn Sonnenberg, ICRE Executive Chair, as well as to conference leads Catlin Pilon and Jillian Kerr.

We also dedicate this show to the memory of Sara Roque, an extraordinary filmmaker and arts administrator, who gave so much to The Body Electric.

Allison Crawford
Halifax, 2023

Artists

Artist Statement

My art is an extension of me. It is personal, often drawing from my experiences as a first-generation Harari woman that was raised on Turtle Island. My art practice began as a mission to share the stories of my community, but it’s evolved into something greater than me. I’m grateful for the window of awareness provided via art, this storytelling method is what moves me.  Themes of memory, liberation and resistance inform my practice.

Artist’s Biography

Niya Abdullahi is a Filmmaker, multidisciplinary Artist and the founder of @Habasooda, a collective dedicated to sharing the richness of the Muslim experience through a variety of storytelling avenues. Themes of identity, liberation and resistance inform her work. She uses art as a vessel to promote social change. Her films have screened at TIFF Next Wave, Nuit Blanche Saskatoon, Breakthroughs Film Festival, Gallery 44, amongst others..

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Artist Statement

60 Day Free Trial is a series of 65 woodblock prints based on a website developed by Dr. Kenneth Rockwood at the QEII Hospital.  During a sixty day trial period, I used collage, painting and printmaking to represent the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in progressive order ending with the autopsy to confirm the disease.  These prints relate to Art and Advocacy as they visually advocate for an understanding of the patient’s experience of this disease.

Artist’s Biography

Since 2004, Rose Adams has been exploring memory and the brain in her artwork.  She makes anatomy subjective and emotive for the viewer.  She is a Regular Part-time Faculty member in the Foundation and Fine Arts Departments at NSCAD University and has an extensive exhibition record.  In 2006 she was inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.  She lives, paints and writes in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

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Artist Statement

I work mainly on paper and figuratively. A decade before my mother’s death in 2021 from Covid, I produced the first “Nightgown” after pneumonia landed her in the hospital. The pastel/erasure drawing was completed a year after she died.  With this artwork I pay tribute to her palliative team and a very lovely PSW, Deanna, originally from the Philippines, who came to bathe my mom and dress her in a clean white cotton gown.

Artist’s Biography

Kelley Aitken is an author and artist. She teaches at the Art Gallery of Ontario and co-leads plein air courses in Europe and Canada. Her most recent exhibition was Filamentous with Elaine Whittaker at The Redhead Gallery, Toronto, in the fall of 2022. Kelley’s work can be seen at http://www.kelleyaitken.com

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Artist Statement

The Gift, a single channel video, hosts two dancers working through a broadly evocative spectrum, including isolation and togetherness, challenge and support, and violence and care. The Gift was created as part of Hybrid Bodies, a multidisciplinary research and artistic project focused on exploring the complexities of organ transplantation by raising questions about bodily integrity, personal identity, and the relationship between organ recipients and their donors. 

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Artist Statement

The Letter, a single channel video was created as part two of Hybrid Bodies, a multidisciplinary research and artistic project focused on exploring the complexities of organ transplantation on donor families. The Letter is an imagine letter from a heart transplant donor family member to a recipient. It was written by me but based on over 40 hours of videotape interviews with heart transplant donor families.
 

Artist’s Biography

Ingrid Bachmann is a multi-disciplinary artist who has presented her work nationally and internationally in exhibitions and festivals in Canada, Europe, Asia and South America. Bachmann has a long interest in working at the crossroads of the technological, the generative, the performative and the corporeal. Recent works includes the transdisciplinary project, Hybrid Bodies, a unique collaboration between a cardiac transplant centre and artists and Flux, an art/medical collaboration with head and neck cancer patients.

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Artist Statement

The evidence of things not seeing is a respond to a number of personal experiences related and connected to Health, Science, Faith, Paint and Vulnerability. As we navigate and recover from a world of isolation, this situations leave invisible scars. This series of work present a personal assessment of the value and the capacity of mental and physical recovery in a non-representation and experimental way the work found and hand-draw imagery, manipulation of blueprint.

Artist’s Biography

I am an artist of Black and Hispanic descent working with a disability base out of Hamilton, Ontario. I have a BFA in multidisciplinary studies from The National School of Visual Arts in the Dominican Republic, and also graduated from Altos De Chavon The School of Design, affiliated with Parsons The New School of Design in New York City. Between 1997 and 2023, Delgado has exhibited in public and alternative spaces.

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Artist Statement

My artwork explores the invisible/visible humanness and how we choose to see our in-your-face reality. I have been shooting how we look at in-between moments of everything and nothing in our daily lives. We look at ourselves and look at the street and our alteration of self-awareness becomes mystified. We want to obliterate what we see and how to feel. My works bring humanness conversation into focus in a candid shot. 

Artist’s Biography

Faye Fayerman is a Canadian born Artist and Award Winning Indie Filmmaker. After living in New York for 30 years she has recently moved to Vancouver. Her work is exhibited in Canadian, New York galleries, museum and private collections. She has received art grants for her paintings, photography, films. Her work weaves observations around the human condition. She has been teaching as Professor of Art in NYC, Berkeley, Montreal and Vancouver.

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Artist Statement

My paintings investigate the natural world as active and resilient and consider the interplay of connections between natural and built environments and the possibility of restoration. In terms of the topic Art and Planetary Health, restoration, the act of renewing or repairing, can be viewed as physical and psychological restoration, as well as an ecological process. https://www.sandragregson.ca/

Artist’s Biography

Sandra Gregson is an Ottawa-based artist; her practice includes painting, drawing, sculpture, and video. Sandra holds an MFA from York University and a BFA from NSCAD. She has participated in art residencies in Canada and Europe; her artwork has been exhibited throughout Canada and is included in public collections such as The Art Bank, the City of Ottawa, and private collections. She is represented by Sivarulrasa Gallery: https://sivarulrasa.com/artists/sandra-gregson/

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Artist Statement

Taken, replaced reflects on colonial impositions on the land and landscape and how I am implicated as a person of mixed European and Métis ancestry. Born in Bawating (Sault Ste. Marie) and still living here on the shores of two Great Lakes, my ongoing project confronts my complicated relationship to this land. My process of selecting images to frame and rephotograph mimics processes of resource extraction and hollow gestures of giving back.

Artist’s Biography

Katie Huckson is an interdisciplinary artist living in Bawating (Sault Ste. Marie). She holds a BFA from Algoma University, an MFA from the University of Windsor, and is currently a SSHRC doctoral scholar and PhD Candidate at McMaster University. Huckson has exhibited, performed, and screened work across Canada and abroad. She teaches Visual art and Art History at Algoma University.  

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Artist Statement

I returned to drawing during the pandemic, after a long hiatus working as an academic emergency physician, in order to explore how visual arts can bring meaning to medical practice, and vice versa.  These drawings, from a larger visual essay called ‘Attending,’ are of clinical moments that accompany me home from the ER and eventually get mixed up with memory, dreams and symbols.  They advocate for the necessity of often-buried clinical narratives from frontline providers.

Artist’s Biography

Megan Landes is an emergency physician, Associate Professor and Head of the Division of Emergency Medicine (DFCM) at the University of Toronto.  Her academic and clinical work focuses on global health, including HIV and emergency care in sub-Saharan Africa.   She is a visual artist and draws from clinical experiences shared with patients.  She is interested in exploring frontline provider narratives, in particular our vulnerabilities, which are not always open to us in professional circles.

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Artist Statement

Towards Wholeness is grounded in the belief that individual healing is tied to collective and planetary healing. The spherical armeture of the work holds a poem considering the relationship between individual and planetary health while invisible string holds items used to heal the body. The items include remnants from traditional medicine, fruit, vegetables and trees showing relationships between human and planetary health, our reliance on natural systems and the need to maintain them.

Artist’s Biography

Clara Laratta is an award winning, interdisciplinary artist, born and based in Hamilton, Ontario. She holds an MFA from the University of Waterloo and received her Honours BFA, with distinction, from McMaster University. Laratta has shown her work internationally and across Canada in both solo and group shows. Her work can be found in collections around the world. She is the recipient of numerous awards, grants and scholarships for her research.

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Artist Statement

Through constructed self-portraiture and documenting her environment, Laycock explores the experience of living in a human body. The artist, who lives with Multiple Sclerosis, uses visual strategies to communicate where the limitations of language fail. Her tactile images reflect experiences of transition, loss, and illness.

Artist’s Biography

Hannah Laycock (born 1982, Scotland) cultivated her skills in fine-art photography in Brighton and London.  Her work documents her diagnosis and subsequent experiences of living with Multiple Sclerosis and has appeared as the cover piece, including an extended essay written about her work, in the BMJ’s Medical Humanities Journal, 2017. 

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Artist Statement

This digital bricolage is rendered using photography and collaged imagery. While combining ecology, spirituality, and technology to express my relationship to memory and land. The narrative of the digital triptych takes place in a future pandemic. Where Mother Earth wants her land back. Forcing a generation to live and graze in the sky. As the displaced creatures return to the land. An environmental critique of the effects of urbanization on ancestral inhabitants.

Artist’s Biography

I am a studio technician and instructor in digital and ceramic arts. With over a decade of professional design experience.  I have a BFA from York University in Visual Arts with a focus on sculpture and drawing. Starting this fall, I will attend TMU for an MFA with a concentration in New Media. I am a diverse and eclectic artist. With the desire to grow my practice to help develop the next generation of creatives.

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Artist Statement

‘Mended Leaves’ (2020-ongoing) was initiated through my experience and subsequent reflection of being a mother during the COVID-19 pandemic. These meditative explorations gave me time to reflect on the experience of caregiving during a period filled with unease, when time bent, stood still, and stretched in unfamiliar ways. It led me to consider how the balance of self-care and giving of oneself is fundamentally tied to communication.

Artist’s Biography

Jennifer Long is an artist, curator, and arts administrator. Through a Feminist lens, she works with constructed narratives that are inspired by the quiet moments in women’s lives where seemingly nothing (and everything) occurs. Themes of vulnerability, community, and motherhood are explored within her practice as she examines daily life and her rituals within it. Long’s photography has been exhibited internationally and received support from Canada’s municipal, provincial, and federal arts councils.

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Artist Statement

I am a new media researcher and experimental media artist. I purposefully misuse software tools  through the language of  VFX to expose the process of assembly of moving images. The work is designed to be performative and expressive in ways that make representations less familiar and create a sense of soft discomfort in the viewing experience by using glitch aesthetics, hybrid camera techniques and 3D modeling.

Artist’s Biography

Shaughn Martel is a queer, and neurodivergent new media artist practicing in Tkaronto (Toronto) Ontario. Their work embraces the form through bugs in software and uses flaws of a medium and tricks of perception as the grounds for artmaking. Themes of their work often include augmented subjectivity, social powerlessness, class consciousness and neurodiversity. A recent graduate of OCAD University in 2023, they were the winner of the Nora E. Vaughn Award in Integrated Media

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Artist Statement

“Where Do The Waves Come From?” is a series of sculptural silver pendants, using waves to reflect on system energy and flow dynamics, and benefit ocean conservation. Wave-watching is quintessentially human: equally nourishing, and ominous. We carry land and ocean scapes within us, for life. I research metals for health impacts, seek recycled and ethical sources, up-cycle scrap, and manage guilt—because resource use and ecological change are all witness to our existence in the Anthropocene.

Artist’s Biography

Christine Pedersen makes sculptural metal, ceramics, and one of a kind art jewellery. Her work is particularly identifiable for the unique textured surfaces that she creates, and the clean, spare lines of her organic forms. Her work is often abstract and inspired by her education in natural history, science, and metalwork. Influences in early, classical, medieval, and contemporary art can be found, with narratives related to contemporary issues.

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Artist Statement

When engaging with the healthcare system, its participants – practitioners, patients, trainees, teachers – often encounter emotions that can be challenging to navigate and experience. There are as many ways of processing these states-of-being as there are people living through them. In this drawing, I advocate for these many ways of processing to be given space to flow and heal. This drawing invites an introspective response from the viewer.

Artist’s Biography

Savita Rani is a South Asian woman and a first-generation immigrant settler in Canada. She is a resident physician in Public Health and Preventive Medicine at University of Saskatchewan, and has a Master of Public Health from Queen’s University. She has a special interest in bringing arts and humanities into medical education and public health as tools for practice, teaching, learning and reflection. She maintains a creative practice in visual arts, poetry and prose.

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Artist Statement

I want to bring marginalized groups back to the agora by the very technology that tends to screen them from their vital discussion of their survival and fulfillment in society. 

Artist’s Biography

Since completing his studies in film production at Concordia University, Roberto Santaguida’s films and videos have been shown at more than 400 international festivals.  Roberto is the recipient of the K.M. Hunter Artist Award, the Chalmers Arts Fellowship and a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany.

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Artist Statement

My work is autobiographical—to conceptualise, I use my uprooted hair as the thread to embroider or needlework and make dresses, patterns, and portraits I wanted to give my biological existence a place in my art. Human hair is a filamentous biomaterial that contains dead cells and DNA; my hair contains my DNA, representing my identity. In this piece, I have created a relief uterus, stuffed with my hair, and stitched with my hair.  

Artist’s Biography

Asma Sultana is a multidisciplinary artist. Asma participated in solo art exhibitions and group exhibitions in many different countries. In her diasporic identity, she is Bangladeshi-British and working in Toronto. She is trained in Fine Arts from Bangladesh, England, and Canada. She studies Art History at York University, Canada, and Oxford University, England. To conceptualise her autobiographical work, she uses her hair and thumbprints as her media to explore her identity.

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Artist Statement

“Paper Vertebratin” was created using eco-friendly materials like Japanese paper and paper rope. A testament to the power of art to transform biodegradable materials into a beautiful work of art. It has been designed to resemble a blossoming spinal cord with ribs and inspired by one of my favorite trees the mighty willow known for its healing and environmental contributions. It invites reflection on nature’s inherent value and interconnectedness between human health and the environment.

Artist’s Biography

Kathleen Troy is a Toronto-based multimedia artist whose command over the tactile senses drives a diverse visual practice. Straddling the realms of printmaking, papermaking, textiles, drawing, and painting, Troy’s work explores the tangible experience of the natural world through an ecopsychology perspective. Troy holds her BFA from OCAD University and has worked as a textile printer since 2002.

She was raised by an Emergency room nurse who practiced in SouthWestern Ontario.