Opening Reception | Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance | LaiSun Keane

Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance

curated by Juan Omar Rodriguez

Gina Goico • Perla Mabel • Rixy

September 2 - October 2, 2022

OPENING RECEPTION

Friday September 2, 2022, 5:00-8:00 pm

Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance

A variety of recent projects in the visual arts have focused specifically on the histories, politics, and material cultures of health. These have run the gamut from revealing the inadequacies of healthcare bureaucracies to exploring more expansive models of wellness that consider the psychological, spiritual, or social dimensions of trauma and sickness. Included among these projects are the works of artists Gina Goico, Perla Mabel, and Rixy. These artists have individually explored abundance as an aesthetic strategy and political commitment, embracing formal and narrative maximalism as a mode of resisting the fragmentations of our bodies and communities under white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy. Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance considers how these artists’ strategies of somatic engagement, world-building, and storytelling facilitate an expansive model of community care.

The writings of historian and activist Aurora Levins Morales resonate with the commitments of these three artists and serve as a touchstone for this exhibition. In an essay about storytelling, disability, and justice movements, Levins Morales states, “We survive, when we do, because we are able to build webs of relationships, able to tend to each other, feed each other, able to chain ourselves to fences in loudly chanting groups, able to insist on our own stories about who we are.” Despite the salience of violent discourses and policies that render certain bodies and minds as dangerous, defective, and disposable, we survive and insist on abundance—of joy, pleasure, and comfort. Linking individual needs with collective struggles, Levins Morales reminds us that the ability to heal and resist trauma not only exists within us individually, but also within our relationships to our communities. The paintings, photographs, and sculptures by Goico, Mabel, and Rixy resonate with these sentiments and remind us of the resilience of our bodies and of the power of our commitments to each other.

By Juan Omar Rodriquez

Written for exhibition Communal Medicine: Tending Abundance on view at LaiSun Keane, Boston MA from September 2 to October 2, 2022.

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