CHICAGO, IL.- Take Care is organized in partnership with the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force and aims to shed light on systemic barriers to quality healthcare through the lens of breast cancer. Featuring work by Indira Allegra, Laura Berger, Joan Giroux, and The Think Tank that has yet to be named, this group exhibition explores themes of care, community, vulnerability, and support by way of painting, photography, immersive sound, and text.
The works in Take Care coalesce around the questions: Who takes care? And who receives it? The very concept of care in our culture is gendered – women nurture, women foster, women tend to, women care. What happens, then, when women are in need of care themselves? In particular, how do women of color, poor women, and women without access to premium healthcare fare when illness occurs? And how do the boundaries of healthcare access relate to other support structures (or lack thereof) for women in our society? Each of the works in Take Care addresses these questions with a variety of entry points, ranging from the clinical to the subjective, while the embodiment of womanhood remains palpable and everpresent.
Indira Allegra’s new piece, Did my tumor exhale a memory of you? , nestles a four-channel audio installation within an immersive environment that subtly evokes literal viscera. The gallery swathes viewers in swollen heat and dim redness while speakers play the artist’s voice reciting a text about the process of tumor eradication. Taken as a whole, the work complicates notions of healing. Allegra questions the removal of infected tissue as a unidirectional, alchemical shift from bad to good, from sick to healthy. Instead, the piece centers on the fraught physical and psychic residue of the removal of troubled flesh, of problematic parts.
The work of Joan Giroux presents simplified versions of familiar objects – a bed frame, a white hospital curtain – as vessels of care during the most tenuous moments of life. Giroux tends to these objects with intimate concern, treating them with faintly stitched imagery or poetic text. The absence of body and the recontextualization of these everyday forms encourage the viewer to enter an empathetic, liminal relationship to the ailing. In a similar approach, Giroux’s newest work deals with the weight of absence through displaying a replica of her mother’s nursing uniform, a stand-in for the figure of the caretaker. Giroux inhabits a legacy of care through the memory of her mother and through her often performative artistic practice.
In an artistic research mode, The Think Tank that has yet to be named employs social science methods to delve into the realm of affective relationships through its ongoing project Structures of Support . Since 2012, the Think Tank has amassed responses to a series of surveys about personal and institutional support structures. For the version of the work that appears in Take Care , the survey’s questions focus on healthcare. The Think Tank has synthesized survey responses into an installation of posters, Get Well cards, and a bouquet of flowers. The work invites audience participation, asking viewers to read about others’ experiences and to add their own – therefore expanding upon a collectivity of shared care.
Relatedly, the figurative paintings of Laura Berger declare the possibility of utopic networks of care amongst women. Berger visually codes her figures as multicultural femmes in a muted manner, through hairstyles and curved lines and varying skin tones. These paintings elicit the hard-edge abstraction of 1960s California, obliquely connecting through time and place to the earnest aspirations of communal love running rampant in the region at that time. Her signature style also nods back to activist image-making groups of the 1970s, like the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective. In making these works today, Berger aligns herself with a long herstory of art for a more collaborative, caring future.
Take Care is inspired by and presented in partnership with the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Task Force, whose mission is to save women’s lives by eliminating health disparities. The Task Force addresses a systemic lack of access to quality health screening and treatment for African American, Latina, and other medically underserved women. Forwarding a holistic approach to healthcare, the Task Force strives for breast cancer awareness, prevention, screening, diagnosis, treatment, and survivorship for all women. Like the artworks in Take Care , the Task Force regards the continual work of community-building as a necessary pre-existing condition to radically reimagine our world as equitable, as tender, as healthy.
Weinberg/Newton Gallery highlights the Task Force’s crucial work alongside that of artists who foreground the importance of a culture of reciprocal care. Each work in the exhibition uses a text of sorts to stand in for corporeal experience; and the title Take Care itself refers to a simple line of text that attempts to affect the lives of many. The Take Care Clause of the US Constitution states that the president “shall take care that the laws are faithfully executed.” Applying this notion to the embattled fragility of healthcare in our current moment, as our president repeatedly endeavors to dismantle existing healthcare law with no viable replacement in place, reminds us of how much we as individuals, as collectives, and as citizens need to take action in order to take care.
