Picturing Health
November 9 - December 14

Picturing Health is a group exhibition featuring seven San Diego-based artists making work about health, illness, and disability. Artists in the exhibition include Philip Brun Del Re, Maria Mathioudakis, Bhavna Mehta, Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio, Elizabeth Rooklidge, Akiko Surai, and Christina Valenzuela.

Working in painting, sculpture, photography, and textile, together they ask, what does it mean to represent the vulnerabilities of the body in visual form? The artwork in this exhibition largely avoids linear narratives of recovery, problematizing the dominant ideology of "good" health and recognizing that “ill" health—whether temporary or permanent—is an inevitability. Health is a continuum, constantly in flux, and its complications constitute a foundational facet of human experience. 

Health thus becomes a subject for interrogation, ripe for artistic inquiry. The artists in Picturing Health question how we access the care we need, how experiences of time and space are affected by disability, and how the ill or disabled body can become a site of agency and discovery. Anchored in each artist’s personal experience, the works collectively affirm difference while advocating for interdependence, intimacy, and care. 

Philip Brun Del Re

In this wall drawing, I repurpose and adapt a found t-shirt slogan, “DRUG FREE BODY,” which felt like an absurd and outdated statement. The adaptation relates to my interest in how substances can heal and liberate in a variety of different ways. I find personal connection with these words in relation to the chemotherapy treatment I underwent last year.

Surrender is a flag-like sculpture: an evidential, material record of my body’s stress, strain, exhaustion, and exertion during physical labor. The flag simultaneously operates as an emblem of the sudden upheaval of my labor in the face of a surprising cancer diagnosis. Mounted on the wall, it stands as a reminder of bodily surrender to care in times of overexertion and illness. The pit stain, a visceral record of anxiety and shame, is highlighted instead to indicate rest and transformation. Ultimately, the white flag—a symbol of defeat—oddly enough brings about release.

Philip Brun Del Re (he/him) is an artist and designer based in San Diego, California. Primarily, his visual artwork is a dialogue with found objects, images, and texts. After a surprising health emergency and subsequent treatment for cancer, his work has incorporated themes of personal and collective physical/mental health, and emotional/spiritual wellbeing. Currently, Philip is an MFA candidate at San Diego State University’s School of Art & Design. Recent exhibitions include: Whats Your Type? at Athenaeum Art Center, the site responsive A Practice For Melting Chocolate with Harvest and Gather, and the solo thesis exhibition An Accumulation of Evidence at SDSU.

@slim_chili

Maria Mathioudakis and Maddie Woods 

The source material for Brochure (San Diego) and Brochure (Tijuana) are illustrations created by Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Center layworker and San Diegan Suzann Gage L Ac, RNC, NP. Both diptychs emerge from the study of the images created for the FFWHC publications about self-examination. The FFWHC was founded in 1960s Los Angeles, when a group of laywomen, known as the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers, created the plastic speculum now used throughout the world.  

In the United States, the gynecological sciences emerged alongside African chattel slavery. Although, laywomen and midwives had performed abortions and other sexual-health practices in the premodern world. The professional field of gynecology, as practiced by medical doctors today, was developed through the torture of enslaved women in the mid-1800s in Alabama. The low-cost, plastic speculum developed by the FFWHC was an alternative tool which allowed for a new form of self-examination outside of the violent history of gynecological science. Although FFWHC laywomen created elaborate practices for the communal use of the plastic speculum, hoping to find some immanent truth within themselves and each other, they ultimately found that even their de-mystified bodies were always and already socially constructed by notions of sex and gender. 

FFWHC formerly had clinics across the southwest, including facilities in San Diego and Tijuana. These works were created as celebrations and meditations on these local histories. Both FFWHC Brochure (San Diego) and FFWHC Brochure (Tijuana) were produced collaboratively by Maria Mathioudakis and  Maddie Woods.

Maria Mathioudakis (b. California, 1989) graduated with an MFA in Visual Arts from UCSD in 2023. Her work in Picturing Health was first shown as a part of a solo show titled Immanent, which explored and critiqued the feminist self-help practice of “self examination.”

Bhavna Mehta

How can we read a disabled body as a place? My before- and after-surgery X-rays from almost forty years ago become a landscape stitched with the colors that evoke mountains, meadows, deserts, rivers, trees, and rocks. As I align myself with features that shape and form the land, my body returns to a primal place where injury can sit alongside discovery.

Bhavna Mehta works with paper, thread, and words to tell stories about longing and relating that combine figurative and landscape imagery with botanical motifs, text, and shadows. She is a Gujarati immigrant from India and lives on unceded Kumeyaay land in San Diego. Bhavna has exhibited widely in San Diego and Southern California. From time to time she teaches in the papermaking studios at Penland and Women’s Studio Workshop. Writing about her work will appear in the Journal of Modern Craft in Fall 2024. She is currently an MFA student in the Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM.

bhavnamehta.com

Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio

The installation Entre Nosotros (Between Us) explores the complex relationship my partner and I have with our child’s medical and sensory equipment as a consequence of her multiple disabilities. The work stems from the realization that we never discarded the present objects, and the implications of having kept them. These objects, which at first meeting feel alien, sterile and intimidating, have become commonplace to us—relics of our family’s life. Entre Nosotros explores these objects as visual representations of our intimacy between caregivers and recipients, of the story between us, of the barriers between us, of the dialogue between. They are embodiments of our hopes, pain, fears, and endeavors. Some objects have even become extensions of our disabled child’s identity, such as the communication symbols. Access to alternative communication is significant for non-speakers and the intellectually disabled in a world where they are told what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and presumed incompetent or unable to know their own needs or wants. Words allow disabled individuals to invoke their right to have opinions and self-determination. The word “more” stands as a challenge, a reality, and a foretelling.

This drawing came unplanned, as a result of the frustrations, indignation, and impotence that accumulate from living in a deeply ableist world. The complexities of caring and advocating for a child with multiple disabilities and health conditions are eclipsed when compared to the emotional fatigue and societal alienation resulting from dealing with a world that, for the most part, devalues a disabled person’s life and rights. This work explores the mental health difficulties that caregivers experience by the pressures put on them from society, and questions the incongruous reality of the caregiver being told repeatedly to “have hope,” “be optimistic,” and take it “day by day,” while subtly being rejected, excluded, and ignored at the same time.

Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio is a Mexican artist whose work includes oil painting, drawing, muralism, and installation. Her current work focuses on the concept of time, disability, and the transitions of change through the kaleidoscopic perspectives of her individual narrative, astro-physics, philosophy, and memory. She received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art and her BA in Art History and Visual Arts at the University of San Diego. Ortiz-Rubio has exhibited her artwork internationally in the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and the United States, in such places as the Timken Museum of Art, Centro Cultural Tijuana, Oceanside Museum, Quint Gallery, Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, Instituto Cultural Cabañas in Guadalajara, and Bread & Salt among others. She currently teaches drawing and painting at the University of San Diego.

tatianaortizrubio.com

Elizabeth Rooklidge

This series of digital collages mines the dizzying complexity of managing our health in the age of the internet. The project draws on a wide range of material—from 15th-century medical illustration to early x-rays, from pseudoscientific cartoons to contemporary stock photography—all sourced online. The works suggest the long history of looking for answers when faced with health issues, as well as the contemporary surfeit of information (and misinformation) at our fingertips. As a person with multiple chronic illnesses, I find the internet to be a place where hope, fear, possibility, and frustration coexist uncomfortably—it is a digital space that seems to offer answers, yet most often yields more questions.

Elizabeth Rooklidge (she/her) is a San Diego-based writer, educator, curator, and sometimes artist, whose multi-faceted creative practice examines the intersection of art and illness. Her work has appeared in publications such as Able Zine, Lassitude Zine, Variable West, and Dismantle Magazine, and at institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Elizabeth previously served as Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Associate Curator at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York. In 2020 she founded HereIn Journal, for which she currently acts as Editor and frequently contributes writing and interviews. Elizabeth also teaches art history at the University of San Diego.

elizabethrooklidge.com

Akiko Surai

“All that you touch. You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.” - Octavia Butler

The embroidery and beading of Untitled (Mass 02) creep like fungus or lichen across its stone. As the piece develops, the foam “body” holds and grasps the stone, learning from and knowing the surface, eventually circluding and absorbing it. 

These works draw from natural examples of non-linear growth as an analog to my experience healing from traumatic brain injury. Thinking of my body and the mixed conglomerates of the Mass series as responsive, complex organisms, with the ability to metabolize and alchemize, instead of a malfunctioning machine allows us both to explore healing as a process of growth and expansion instead of a return to an untouched state.

Akiko Surai (she/they) is an artist and writer working in San Diego, California. Surai explores memory, interconnectivity, and inheritance through diverse studio, research, and curatorial projects. Their current work investigates the body in its capacity for adaptation and change. Surai earned her Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art with honors and distinction at San Diego State University in 2011, completed graduate work at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2013, and holds a specialized certificate in museum studies with an emphasis in contemporary art. She is the current editor at The Hill Street Country Club, a community-centered arts non-profit in Oceanside, CA.

akikosurai.com

Christina Valenzuela

I consider all of my paintings in this show self-portraits. In making work, the thing that occupies my mind (literally and figuratively) is narcolepsy: a neurological disorder that affects the brain’s ability to control sleep-wake cycles. Disks surrounding the top of the head symbolize the electrodes of an electroencephalogram, which measures electrical brain activity and helps diagnose and understand neurological and sleep disorders. Sleep absorbs my figure, needing to rest so badly that the only thing that matters is making sure I breathe. I’m completely consumed in that moment and, metaphorically, in my life. My coffee cup, a source of wakefulness and means of coping, is empty and exhausted—the coffee goes so fast, just like my energy. Painting these images offers a means of transformation and reorientation. Illustrating honest accounts of persistent illness allows me to process, solidify, confront, and embrace these mental and physical experiences that shape my life, giving them a new body and making space in my own.

Christina Valenzuela (b. 1996) is an artist who lives and works in San Diego, CA. In her oil paintings, drawings, and sculptures, she investigates with curiosity the experience of living with narcolepsy—a neurological condition that disrupts sleep-wake cycles—and the physical, mental, and emotional effects of the condition. She received her BS in Marketing from Indiana University Bloomington, her BFA in Painting from Arizona State University, and her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Washington. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in Arizona, California, and Washington.

christinavalenzuela.com