MALLORY  SHOTWELL

Maintenance Body investigates the mastectomy experience as a structure of labor. It positions recovery not as an event or outcome, but as an extended system of continuous, repetitive, and largely unacknowledged work. This labor begins before surgical intervention and persists long after institutional care withdraws.

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Situated within a lineage of feminist and conceptual practices that foreground maintenance, duration, and reproductive labor, including the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mary Kelly, the exhibition relocates these concerns from public and domestic systems to the medicalized body. Where maintenance has historically been understood as the work that sustains infrastructure and daily life, Maintenance Body identifies the body itself as a site of ongoing maintenance. It is managed, stabilized, and sustained through forms of labor that remain structurally invisible.

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Working across photography, video, sound, installation, and text, the exhibition constructs a record that institutional medicine does not produce.  It accounts for accumulation. Tasks repeat. Time extends. Materials gather. The work attends to what exceeds the clinical encounter and what is required to live through and alongside it.