Window Dressing XVII: Sarah Sudhoff
Exhibition Dates: February 21-26, (visible 24 hours/day)
Reception & Performance: Sunday, February 27, 6-7:30 pm, Performance at 7pm in the ICOSA window
"Focusing Screen" reflects my ongoing interest in the female body, reproductive health, access to care, and our interactions with medical devices through a live, durational performance featuring the new VieVision mirror. The device was created to facilitate the examination of one’s own vagina, perineum and anus. The device – and in turn, the performance – aims to facilitate a moment to reclaim familiar knowledge of the most intimate parts of the human anatomy, anatomy that is more mysterious to oneself than it is to others, be they lovers or doctors. The audiences' view of the performance will be slightly obstructed with the repetition of the mirror's pattern affixed across the gallery's three windows. As audience members strain to catch a glimpse of the performance, their own gaze and the reflection of those around them will come into view.
Background
My interdisciplinary practice interweaves themes of gender, science and personal experience through photographs, performance, sculpture, video, animation and sound. My works can be categorized into one or more of the following three areas of concern: Ethics of Care, Social Practice, and the Visualization of Data. My most recent work centers on how depicting new forms of data collection can be expressed in tangible objects created from ephemeral human experiences. And, recent performances center on the body as both a source of data and material. By using creative practice as a mediator between subjective and objective experience, I engage in conversations that address bodies and communities as shared and yet, ultimately, distinct.
In 2006, I documented my first private performance for the camera, titled Self Exam. In my gynecologist's office, following numerous consecutive abnormal pap smears and a LEEP -- a surgical procedure to remove cancerous tissue from my cervix caused by HPV -- I used a handheld mirror to guide my hand to perform a self-pap smear and collect tissue samples from my cervix. The performance focuses attention on the physical and emotional scars cancer and the resulting surgery can leave on the body, while challenging the prescribed medical treatments and role of the patient in participating in their own recovery.
Over the last fifteen years, attention to my health and my body have come in and out of focus as the subject of my art. As recently as 2020, my HPV returned, likely provoked by stress resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, and prompted me to undergo two colposcopies (cervical biopsies) to gauge the severity of the infection.
As a divorced, single mother of two pre-teen children, I have encountered financial challenges in accessing healthcare, relying primarily on Medicaid for care, which is all too often inadequate for my needs. The result is a high level of anxiety about my own health and my ability to therefore care for my children. As a stark reminder of this, in 2021, in the midst of global pandemic which has already killed more than 80,000 Texans, the state’s legislature chose to focus on the abortion debate, voting to end women’s right to choose. The performance will, hopefully, serve as a gentle reminder of the strange ways in which we, others, and even disembodied institutions like the state and the medical establishment treat and regulate the most intimate parts of women's bodies.
