Maintenance Body
Maintenance Body investigates the mastectomy experience as a structure of labor. Specifically, the continuous, repetitive, and largely unacknowledged maintenance work that constitutes recovery — the tasks that begin before surgery and extend far past the point the medical system stops watching.
Working across photography, video, sound, installation, and text, this exhibition produces a record that institutional care never generated: a full accounting of what survival actually costs, and what it looks like when someone finally writes it down.
The exhibition moves through three phases. Before documents the anticipatory labor of preparation — the exhaustive, invisible work of readying the body and the domestic space for what the surgical system is about to do. A looped video of bed-making, filmed in real time and unedited, opens the exhibition. The actual audio recording of a nurse delivering pre-surgical instructions plays on loop in the open gallery, indifferent to when viewers arrive or leave, just as the system was indifferent to the singularity of that moment for the person receiving it. During builds the record of the system acting on the body: sixty objects present at surgery or recovery, each photographed as artifact during their active role in recovery at identical scale on black ground regardless of whether the hospital or the patient chose them; the complete handwritten drain log on actual medical forms, accumulating entries across weeks past the point the viewer expects it to stop; six months of recovery images compiled into a single durational video with no music and no editing for emotional effect. After catalogs what the system leaves behind — a multi-channel video installation of the ordinary physical capacities the body could no longer perform, each one looping independently, and at the center of the exhibition, the actual bed that held this body through the long work of recovery, present with its full bedside accumulation intact. The viewer can stand beside it, or sit on it.
Throughout the exhibition, a broadside guide — received at entry, carried through every room, taken out of the gallery — functions as the theoretical and emotional spine of the work. Written like a traditional guidebook, this serves as a participatory artifact of the experience that welcomes audiences to engage, write, and otherwise share their experiences of navigation in systems of health and wellness, illness and suffering. It moves through declaration, task list, and systems inventory. The argument does not stay in the room.
The domestic spaces: the kitchen, the bedroom, the hospital room, the doctor's offices, the bathroom, are active participants in survival, each reorganized into a system of care that the patient designs, executes, and sustains. Preparation is the art of anticipation. Recovery is the art of becoming. The body is the medium, the schedule is the frame, and the accumulation of labor rendered visible across this exhibition is the work itself.
Maintenance Body extends the feminist art lineage inaugurated by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose Maintenance Art Manifesto (1969) positioned the labor of sustaining systems as legitimate and rigorous artistic practice. Healing is ongoing maintenance. This exhibition is its record.
This work was created in preparation for, and during the most intense healing period of my fifth mastectomy. Acting as both a coping mechanism, an artifact of experience, and documentation amid a medical landscape where all too often patients are treated as numbers: gaslit, ignored, or left to their own researchers and advocates.
Moving through these elements myself, and working to find a visual articulation for the processes that a person must move through when enduring medical procedures. As of the time of this writing, thirteen months later, I am still navigating this terrain, managing both my own body and patient advocacy, as the fifth mastectomy failed, and I am facing a sixth surgery.
Selected Works
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Pieces coming soon.