Science History Institute, 2021
The Science History Institute, January 2021 - January 2023. .
Between Us and Catastrophe. A life-sized COVID-safer outdoor exhibit.
The exhibit installed.
CAMRA 2024
The collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA) and the Screening Scholarship Media Festival (SSMF) 2024 "Practices of Resurrection and Necromancy" April 19-20th. .
Between Us and Catastrophe. A visual oral history of COVID-19 Nurses.
Signage for the exhibit.
Short description of the exhibit: Portraits and interviews with twenty ICU & Emergency Room nurses who worked in places from Virginia to Boston, beginning on 3/23/2020 and continuing through today. Some, photographed yearly at the same day, time and place. The Exhibit also includes a number of melt-blown and woven fiber textile mask materials.
"We had a lot of COVD patients who were really, really sick. When they got off the ventilator, onto regular oxygen they could leave the ICU. But I didn’t have any patients that left, I didn’t ever have any patients who lived." --Linda, ICU Nurse, June 30, 2022
The ICU is a place where the collected scientific wisdom of humanity is focused. With potions & careful alchemy, the faintest glow of life can be rekindled from the dead or barely living. It is the realized culmination of an aeonic struggle to conquer death. But that space is inhabited by mere humans, who, for all their majicks, suffer the anguish of the ordinary.
The process of reviving the dead, even metaphorically, is built of bricks of failure. For 4 years doctors and nurses worked to revive “coded” COVID-19 patients -- to bring them back to life after the virus had consumed them. Almost every one of these attempts failed.
This work is a secret visual history of how the shadow of death remains on those who bore witness that not even the celebration of the rare return from death can assuage.
“Before, you’d send someone to the ICU & later think, ‘I wonder what happened to them?’ And you’d see ‘left for rehab’, ‘getting better’, and think, ‘That’s good!’ Now you look them up and it’s just dead, dead, dead, dead — everyone you took care of is dead.” --Alex-ER Nurse, January 6, 2021
Keywords: Gendered-labor, resilience, reclaiming value, bearing witness, socio-emotional
Exhibit description: The complete work consists of more than 200 images and hours of interviews, although it is easy to create smaller exhibition series’ from this and it can be curated to fit any space. Each image (with a few exceptions) is a combination of a photographic image printed through a textile fiber mask. There are also text panels with interview excerpts from the oral history. The preferred exhibit is 24x36 inch panels printed on foamboard, though printing some images at a smaller size is perfectly acceptable to adapt to available space. (The exhibit could be configured to fit in a phone booth, a van, a restroom -- it’s very adaptable.) The foamboard is lightweight, easily replaceable and can be hung with non-destructive adhesive.
The exhibit also includes a variable number of 8x10 floating frames that contain reclaimed melt-blown and woven fiber protective mask materials. Ideally these should be in a place without direct sunlight but they can be draped.
There is an audio/video component which will play on a large screen.
Click here to watch a 70 second video tour of the exhibit.