Chronically Online
Chronically Online Gallery
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Chronically Online Gallery is a virtual gallery space dedicated to showing artists living with chronic illness and disabilities.
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Current Show
Testimonial Body
June 15th 2022
We are excited to present a solo exhibition featuring Frances Bukovsky
@frances_bukovsky
Artist Statement:
I didn’t recognize proof-making as an aspect of my photographic process until I began working on Pathology in late 2020. As I exposed my personal medical archive onto silver paper, I began to wrestle with the expectations placed upon ill and disabled individuals to justify qualifications for accommodation, treatment, assistance, care, and support. The process of making this work continuously invites me to consider the disconnect between the impact of multiple chronic illnesses on my life and the medical descriptions of those conditions.
This reflection on proof-making brought me back to the body of work that laid the groundwork for the direction of my current photographic practice. Where the Red Flowers Bloom is a project that argues with the years of medical gaslighting prior to, during, and after being diagnosed with endometriosis. As I made self-portraits I slowly began to become aware of how disconnected from selfhood I felt after experiencing both a perceived lack of bodily autonomy in medical situations and treatments that sent me into a physiological and psychological crisis.
Making photographs allowed me to reconnect to my physical body and generate the self-awareness I needed in order to advocate for myself more effectively in my treatments. Looking back, I needed to see myself in these images in order to move past the internal and external expectations of ability and health that I felt.
In this work, there is a tension between rejecting the need for proof while simultaneously providing that proof. It is similar to the tension created by often invisible, or hard-to-see symptoms and conditions. On the one hand, I have a deep-rooted understanding that what I experience is real, regardless of the perceptions of those around me. However, I am also painfully aware of the constant demand to prove the severity of my symptoms. This is present in my life as insurance denials, perceived lack of urgency from medical professionals, unsolicited medical advice from strangers, and the hard-to-navigate medical and social service systems that demand definitive proof, and lots of it, of disease.
Both of these projects look at medical proof of illness. Pathology provides evidence, and Where the Red Flowers Bloom functions as a reminder that a pathology report is not a description of quality of life. At the center of both is my lived experience as a patient with chronic conditions, both visible and invisible.
Curatorial Statement:
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
Art and Image Descriptions
Title: Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Forgoten
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Shadows on a Sunlit Morning
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Assistance Needed
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Rivers of Viscosity
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Chronic Neck Pain
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Chronic Inflammation
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: The Mornings are Heavy Sometimes
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Hemosiderin Deposit
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Edgar as Healing Companion
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Inverted T Waves
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Excision Surgery
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Flare
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Viral Overgrowth
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Imprints Of the Bathroom Rug
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Calendar
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Leflunomide
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Clinging Tightly
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Pharmacy Trips
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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Title: Airing the Wounds
Artist: Frances Bukovsky
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