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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

Current Show

Testimonial Body

June 15th 2022

We are excited to​ present a solo exhibition featuring Frances Bukovsky

@frances_bukovsky 

www.francesbukovsky.com

 

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

Hold Music Soundscape created for the exhibition
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Art and Image Descriptions

A white non-binary person lays on a grey bed, their short brown hair fanning behind them. Their face is red from large cystic acne and they are looking toward the right of the frame. Their shoulders are taunt with tension.

Title: Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A person with long brown hair raising their arm with stubble armpit hair and two forgotten ekg stickers on their ribcage. They are surrounded by darkness.

Title: Forgoten

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A gold and black image of the bottom half of a person’s face and neck revealed by golden morning light. Their lips are parted slightly and there is angry red acne on their cheeks. Their eyes are completely swallowed by the shadows in the frame.

Title: Shadows on a Sunlit Morning

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A white non-binary person wearing a beige bralette, white abdominal binder, and white surgical underwear stained with blood at the crotch sits on a walker. Their head and bottom portion of their legs are cropped out of the photo.

Title: Assistance Needed

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A narrow purple lumen with splatters of saliva and triangular pills dotting the top part of the print.

Title: Rivers of Viscosity 

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A brown lumen featuring a red MRI image in the middle of a neck. The background is abstract shapes and illegible handwritten notes.

Title: Chronic Neck Pain 

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A gold and blue print where Frances Bukovsky is barely legible and in the upper center is typed “Prednisone 10mg Tablet.” The rest of the print is an abstract grid and swirled pattern.

Title: Chronic Inflammation

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A white person with short brown hair wearing a beige bralette and white polka dotted underwear stands in the center of the frame, half in blue shadow, half illuminated by bars of light. Behind them is an open closet, and to the right is a shelf of photo equipment.

Title: The Mornings are Heavy Sometimes

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A yellow, orange, and pink print with a brain MRI in the center with a highlighted dot in the top left corner. A pathology report is abstracted behind the image.

Title: Hemosiderin Deposit

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

Edgar, a black and white cat, lays pushing against a white arm on a grey bed next to a person wearing a grey tanktop, white abdominal binder, and grey pants. Their hand rests on their chest

Title: Edgar as Healing Companion

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A brown, purple, and pink print of an abstracted ECG showing peaks of a heartbeat. Some of the beats make inverted peaks shaped like a V.

Title: Inverted T Waves

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A white non-binary person wearing blue shorts and a tan bralette lays on a grey and blue bed with an abdomen swollen from surgery dotted with 4 laproscopic incisions. Their hand is on their chest with an orange allergy alert bracelet, a red blood type bracelet, and a white hospital bracelet.

Title: Excision Surgery

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A white nonbinary person with medium length brown hair is laying with their back to the camera on a tan tile bathroom floor wedged between a white toilet and a beige tub. They are curled and tensed in pain. Light spills over their body from a window in the top of the frame.

Title: Flare

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A thin print in hues of grey, purple, and brown, with a center splotch describing an overgrowth of viruses in the lower respiratory tract.

Title: Viral Overgrowth

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

Two pale knees with bruises and indentations from a rug extend diagonally across the frame. They are resting on a grey wrinkled sheet.

Title: Imprints Of the Bathroom Rug

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A purple print with bright blue splatters. A prednisone dose pack with the pills popped out is in the center in almost white yellow.

Title: Calendar

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

An orange and blue lumen with a Leflunomide pharmacy sheet in the center giving information about the prescription. CVS pharmacy bags are abstractly layered in the background.

Title: Leflunomide

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A white arm clings to a white shower curtain rod. There are massive bruises at the inside of the elbow as well as adhesive residue. There are veins showing through the skin of the upper arm and shoulder.

Title: Clinging Tightly

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

A bright orange and brown print of CVS Pharmacy and Walgreens bags collaged in a wrinkled form.

Title: Pharmacy Trips

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

a white non-binary person starts to take off a white abdominal binder from a swollen abdomen with a visible laparoscopy incision above th line of their white surgical underwear. They are wearing a black fitbit on their wrist and there is a bruise on their upper thigh.

Title: Airing the Wounds

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

Title: 20/20

Artist: Frances Bukovsky

Image Description:

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