Art & Healing: Body Burden
November 20, 2008—January 9, 2009
Art & Healing: Body Burden features gallery exhibitions, performances, brown bag dialogues and youth workshops that take a frank and creative look at the connections between our bodies, our environment and our modern way of life.
In our Sandy Agustín Gallery, visitors are offered an intimate look at the effect of environmental toxins on the most vulnerable and most frequently exposed members of our population, and at the growing incidence of chronic disease around the globe. Bear witness, through photographic work by National Geographic photojournalist Peter Essick, to the plight of workers and low-income communities around the world who experience chemical body burden from work and home-related chemicals: pesticides, flame-retardants, PCBs, dioxins and heavy metals found in our environment, food, and products.
In our Main Gallery, a diverse collection of paintings, sculpture, photography, multi-media and interactive installations investigate the concept of body burden from creative, philosophical, sociological and even mythical perspectives. Local and national visual artists, selected from more than 40 artist proposals, pose questions, reflect on and celebrate our relationship with the environment. Jane Powers’ mixed media installation offers commentary on the methods we have invented to “repair the body” by reinventing its very nature. Rachel Orman delves into the melding of magical and material worlds through her colorfully painted imagery of the animalistic, mythological and elemental facets of our bodily consciousness. Mireille Vautier urges us to embrace our paradoxical relationship with the synthetic and natural worlds, rendering “modest, non-biodegradable” daily objects such as recycled plastics with embroidery in order to “revive them and attempt to uncover their nobility by hand-stitching my patterns on their surface.” B-Girl Be artists display painted body casts celebrating the courage of local hip-hop dancer B-girl MonaLisa, a recent breast cancer survivor.
Intermedia Arts and partners Healthy Legacy and Headwaters Foundation For Justice invite you to join local artists, food growers and providers, environmental activists, young people, policy makers and health care practitioners in re-working our definition of a “healthy community.”
Generous support for Art & Healing: Body Burden is provided in part by COMPAS United Arts. Additional support for the youth spoken word workshops, Art Treats Lunches and other community education efforts provided by Headwaters Foundation for Justice.