The Gift In The Wound is an art show housed at Flux Factory curated by IDHA member and organizer Noah Phillips. The show, which ran in person from January 29-February 7, is republished here on the IDHA blog to share its works with a wider audience. View the original catalog here.

The Gift in the Wound was originally framed as a show about mental health. However, through my experiences working as a Peer Specialist in New York City, training as a social worker, and organizing with the Institute for the Development of Human Arts, I have come to understand “mental health” not as a topic in of itself but as a unifying theme for countless endeavors with some common elements: namely, an acknowledgment of suffering, a commitment to heal, and personal and collective growth that results from integrating the encounter and expressing the experience to others.

The mental health frame is deceptively limiting, for true healing takes many forms and very few of them take place in a therapists’ office. Resilience needs to be truly lived in situ and witnessed in relationship, to be appreciated.

In curating this show I have sought artists who are specifically conscious of the journey their wounds, their suffering, has taken them on. Some are still struggling daily, some have already integrated the insights and experiences from their struggles. Or both! Healing isn’t linear. I have sought variety both in medium and in story. But my hope is that their inclusion in this exhibition will shed light on the universality and beauty of the experience as well. I am so grateful to those who have contributed for sharing their hard-won, and so often unseen, journeys with me and with us.

Noah Phillips, January 2021

Anything But Weak, 2020

Megan Bent

I use chlorophyll printing, which uses UV light to print photographic images directly onto leaves, to explore my experience of chronic illness and how illness/disability is represented in society. I am interested in the disconnect in the way disability is most often understood as a purely negative experience and the way the fragility of nature is seen with a lens of reverence.

The chlorophyll printing process (where one print/exposure may take anywhere from 8- 72 hours) relies on flexibility, interdependence with nature, and echos my experience of Crip Time, living in a body/mind that values slowing down, connection, and care over speed and production.

The action of printing representations of disability onto leaves highlights the organic nature of disability, reframing it as a part of human diversity. Printing medical imagery reclaims my medicalized body creating a new sense of agency. The fact that chlorophyll prints are impermanent, and will continue to decay over time, asks the viewer to confront the interdependence and bodily impermanence we all share.

Megan Bent is a Connecticut based artist exploring disability culture and identity through alternative process photography. Her artwork has been exhibited widely across the United States and she recently exhibited new video work at F1963 in Busan, South Korea. She has been an artist in residence at the Nobles School in Dedham, MA and at the Honolulu Museum of Art, in Honolulu, HI.

meganbent.com | @m_e_g_g_i_e_b

Anything But Weak, 2020
Site specific installation of Digital Archival Prints from
chlorophyll print scans
Various dimensions (11 prints) totaling 30 in x 20 in

Poppits

Angela Rogers

It’s difficult to see my wounds as a gift. Making my poppets is a painful experience; yet, at some point, following their individual births, they begin to speak and tell me what they want to be. They take my trauma into their little bodies. When I think about it, it’s like baptism by fire: the trinity of my wounds – physical, mental & emotional – transfigures like alchemy. Through this metamorphosis, I am able to channel my anxiety, stress & depression into a kind of affirmation. I transcend the pain of existence through their beauty and the gestures of creating art.

Born in West Virginia in 1963, Angela Rogers currently lives in NYC. She is an autodidactic artist and, for over 35 years, a reader of tarot cards. Rogers began to create three-dimensional shapes following brain surgery in 2012. The practice was intuitive, spontaneous, and mediumistic in nature. It was a form of meditation to stitch herself back together in the unfamiliar contexts of brain damage and medical trauma. Over time her forms became figurative and complex, drawing on a variety of mediums. Different personae began to emerge from the shapes, often associated with mythology and the tarot.

The artist refers to these sculptural creations as “Poppets,” which is an old English spelling of the word puppet. They were always made from natural materials, like corn husks, cloth, and twigs, intended to be used in folk magic, witchcraft, and conjuring. Rogers’ are sculpted from clay and wire, then painted, tightly sewn, wrapped, wound, bound, and embellished with beads and talismans. Like the tarot that inspires them, the poppets operate as go-betweens for the unconscious and as navigators on paths toward spiritual transformation.

@angelajrogers for art @ajtarotnyc for tarot readings

Six pieces: Young Widow, The Queen of Skulls, The Magus, Am I Blue, The Princess of Parties, Shabbat
Wire, string, yarn , beads & talismans
Various sizes

What Should I Leave Behind? What Do I Need for Today? What Should I Carry Forward?

Jonathan Sims

These three pieces are visual representations of questions posed to an emerging system of divination/fortune-telling called the Eighty-One Skies. It uses random numbers to reveal images and themes, a type of divination known as cleromancy. It is a ternary system, based on the number three. A pair of coins thrown four times, or four dice with three possible sides thrown once, yield 81 different possible outcomes.

Each of these 81 outcomes is tied to an Image and an Element. The image is a tangible entity or item, and the Element is a concept. Each Element has within it two Directions, which represent opposing parts of the concept. A fifth roll reveals the Element--there is twice the chance of rolling the number three, which incorporates both Directions--or rolling a one or a two reveals one of the opposing Directions.

The Eighty-One Skies began as a way for the artist to engage with and learn from not only the mechanics of divination, but to develop a usable system that could help individuals to encounter personal queries or difficulties in a novel and meaningful way. After asking the questions, the artist generated three answers for each, and has developed unique radiant geometric designs to represent these answers in an abstract way. These designs, based on a rotational transformation of the same polygon nine times, are depicted in each painting.

The Eighty-One Skies is still evolving and changing through use and modifications.

Jonathan Sims is a New York City based visual artist. His visual style is characterized by brightly colored geometric abstractions and simple, minimalist symbology that evokes language and ancient design. By creating original, non-objective physical and digital artifacts, he draws a through-line that connects ancient humanity through history, into today, and suggests possibilities about our distant future.

chromadetic.com | @chromadetic

Three pieces: What Should I Leave Behind? What Do I Need for Today? What Should I Carry Forward?
Acrylic and Watercolor on Paper
15x20 inches each

Savior

Betty Eastland

Many find comfort in the story of Jesus. I, however, deem it a cautionary tale of the dangers of placing impossible burdens on young people.

Children raised in chaotic circumstances often feel a responsibility to keep the peace by sacrificing themselves. When older, they can compensate for not having support when things go wrong with grandiose fantasies of being Jesus or having extraordinary powers.

Inevitably, these attempts to rectify their sense of powerlessness are pathologized and they are diagnosed with an incurable psychiatric illness. It took me 17 years to find people who could truly help me understand my narrative, what was happening in my family that made me feel I had to save them, and how to heal. Now I help young people and their families to reframe and contextualize their experiences. In that way I am a healer of sorts, but not a Savior: I no longer sacrifice myself for the souls of others.

I made this piece to mourn Jesus’ burden, his loneliness, and the fact that because he believed his responsibility was to all souls, his gave up his life. Though he left this earth for us, it is us who must do the work.

Betty Eastland, LMSW, BFA (Buffalo, NY - New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist. She is a graduate from Hunter College’s BFA program and has exhibited throughout New York City. Her work has been showcased at Bertha & Karle Luebsdorf Gallery, Kreate Hub, B(x) Spaces, Fountain Gallery, Amos Eno Gallery and others. Through performance, fiber arts, installation and painting, she explores themes of grief, displacement, mourning, and emotional recovery.

bettyeastland.com | @betty_eastland

Savior
Cheese cloth, burlap, Acrylic Paint, Nails
70 in x 26 in

#106 Secure Treatment: Ultraman goes to the therapist

Ellen Wetmore

I was reading a news article about mental health in prisons by the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe. The manner of delivering therapy in this one prison image was group therapy with each person in a cage, photographed by Suzanne Kreiter. There seemed to be a TV doing the therapy. I don’t know if it was remote tele-therapy or a video recording. It struck me as the worst format ever for a population in crisis.

I’ve been in therapy, etc, for a long time and I have a strong reaction when I see people suffering emotionally. Ultraman appears occasionally in this series of drawings, including this one. His figure is symbolically fluid. He could be gender ambivalent. Could be a dressed up crime fighter because of a history of victimhood, like Batman or Superman. Could be a monster. His mask is like a shield for our vulnerability. And it’s a cage for him too. He tends to be watched and watching. Then again, he doesn’t have eyes. We’d never know.

Ellen Wetmore is a 2012 School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Fellow, a 2015 visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome and served as a juror for the video dance festival InShadow of Lisbon. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the Georgia Fee award and in 2017 was awarded the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Film/Video and a Berkshire Taconic ART Grant. She grew up in Saginaw Michigan, lives in Groton, Massachusetts and is a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

ellenwetmore.com | @ellen.wetmore

#106 Secure Treatment: Ultraman goes to the therapist
Acrylic, ink
14” x 11” (unframed)