this is your

This project takes up parts of the body and the natural world that are ever present but mostly ignored, forgotten, or taken for granted. The canvases bring the visual expectation of a painting; the paintings themselves do not depict what their titles name. Six of the works name body parts — dimple, pinky toe, belly button, eye color, skipped beat — three name natural elements — cloud, rain drop, sky — and the final painting in the series is titled simply this is your, leaving the noun unfilled. The viewer is asked to scan their body and surroundings for the long-ignored or forgotten thing, and to find it without an explicit image on the wall. What is sought is a quiet act of intimate recognition — the revival of an absent presence as a mental image, brought into attention by the title and the empty canvas together.

The body is often hidden in two ways. There is what the culture has agreed to cover — the parts the gaze is not allowed to rest on. And there is what the mind, simply, cannot hold all at once. The world is too large to attend to in full. The sky contains infinity; the body contains uncountable small details; coping requires a frame that fits the world into something legible. The dimple, the pinky toe, the belly button, the eye color, the small features of the body that fall below the threshold of attention — these are not forbidden by any cultural, religious, or aesthetic register. They simply fall outside the frame the mind has drawn around the world to make sense of it. As a clinician I know that a patient often looks at a part of the body only when it becomes painful, cut, ill, or taken away — that is, only when the part has been broken into attention. The hidden body and the overlooked body are two different invisibilities. One is enforced; the other is structural to how perception works at all. this is your takes up the second register. The work refuses to depict what it names so that the viewer can encounter the named thing in their own body, where the looking has not been there long enough to alter it — before the part has had to ask for attention. To name without depicting is an old gesture; the work uses it for the present body.

A story is composed by reading the gallery from left to right. At the center of the space, an interactive piece invites the viewer to write an answer on a small white paper in response to the question: What is one area of your body that you have ignored, forgotten, or taken for granted for a long time, up until reading this question now? The folded answers accumulate in a transparent plastic box on a black pedestal — present in the gallery, visible in their number, but not in their content.