If you don’t already know how to check your tits and/or balls for cancerous lumps, you can learn everything you need from Shannon Gerard’s installation currently on view at Green Lantern Gallery. Despite their purported educational value, Gerard’s screen-printed illustrations work best as comedy rather than straightforward instructional material.
Jennifer Wilkey’s photographs of knitted and embroidered objects in hospital settings combine the warmth of handicraft with the sterility of medical institutions. The objects themselves, such as a doctor’s mask embellished with embroidered microorganisms, or cups of pill capsules stuffed with green fabric, seem more at home in staged photographs than on display in the gallery.
Clare Britt and Derek Haverland address consumer culture in conjunction with pathological illness. Haverland’s installation of stacks of stark white credit cards, reminiscent of pristine medical settings, recalls economic issues surrounding healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry. In a similar vein, Britt’s wall collage of found images from fashion magazines only relates to illness in the context of this exhibition. A swirling black mass of Fendi and Versace labels, shoes, jewelry, and sunglasses, brings to mind a tumorous growth or a magnified pathogen, as well as consumerism as a kind of sickness. (Jamie Keesling)
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