Testimonial Body
Solo Show by Frances Bukovsky
There is often a hesitancy in accepting the experience of other people's pain as truth. Elaine Scarry, in her book The Body in Pain, writes “To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.” Therefore, the burden of proof falls on the sufferer as the burden of others' pain is too much to bear.
During our first exhibition Booting Up we explored how we pictorially represent an internal struggle and, on the other end of the spectrum, how we abstract the body to come to an accurate representation of an experience that transcends the physical form. These concepts relate to the exploration of proof-making found in Bukovsky’s work.
In their body of work Where the Red Flowers Bloom they capture fleeting symptoms, document the life of a bruise, and catalog days spent endlessly in bed. The work is as viscerally personal as it is a form of record making.
In their Pathology series Bukovsky explores this method of making through the abstraction of medical documents. Each piece imbues medical documentation with an obvious subjectivity. The resulting work hints at diagnosis, categorization, and record while creating art that instead speaks to the amorphous nature of illness.
The resulting push and pull between these methods of making created Testimonial Body
There is often a hesitancy in accepting the experience of other people's pain as truth. Elaine Scarry, in her book The Body in Pain, writes “To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.” Therefore, the burden of proof falls on the sufferer as the burden of others' pain is too much to bear.
During our first exhibition Booting Up we explored how we pictorially represent an internal struggle and, on the other end of the spectrum, how we abstract the body to come to an accurate representation of an experience that transcends the physical form. These concepts relate to the exploration of proof-making found in Bukovsky’s work.
In their body of work Where the Red Flowers Bloom they capture fleeting symptoms, document the life of a bruise, and catalog days spent endlessly in bed. The work is as viscerally personal as it is a form of record making.
In their Pathology series Bukovsky explores this method of making through the abstraction of medical documents. Each piece imbues medical documentation with an obvious subjectivity. The resulting work hints at diagnosis, categorization, and record while creating art that instead speaks to the amorphous nature of illness.
The resulting push and pull between these methods of making created Testimonial Body