My final MFA thesis exhibition was an intermedial expression of my explorations of care—with my bodymind, through images, and for abject and anxious matter. The installation took the form of a waiting room transposed into the gallery within Emily Carr University during the MFA group exhibition, A Distant Presence.
The installation was plastic, not only in the materials making up the artworks in the space, but also the chairs, the table, the carpet, the television, dissolved in the water, and within the pages of the companion zine. It is also photographic: full of screens, frames, and moving images and with a tenuous trace of my own experiences in psychiatric waiting rooms over the past 12 years. As with all images, it is a place of what-has-been as well as what-is-to-come.
Waiting rooms are, like plastic, a failed technology: while designed to represent the frictionless, timeless qualities of an assembly line, they ultimately exist because of the impossible efficiency of care within a capitalist, transactional context. This felt friction and the raw edges it creates reveal the waiting room’s potential for reimagination and intervention.
To be in waiting rooms is to be surrounded by misfit bodyminds, feeling the presence of illness most often in silence, unknowing. What is known and felt, is the sense of being in potentiality—that we are all in an in-between—waiting for something. For me, this feeling can be a source of solidarity, in the face of what is most likely an expensive and unsustainable practice of receiving market-based care, and often providing nothing at all in terms of actual well-being.
There is little agency in a traditional waiting room. You are being received as well as waiting toreceive: good news, bad news, treatment, diagnosis, prescriptions, bills, an invitation to wait more. The weight of waiting on the body is understood by those who do it often.
This installation was a negotiation with waiting’s effects and, in particular, with its relationship to the agency. Transposed from its traditional locations, a visitor could wait for as long or as little as they wanted, could engage with each layer of media as much or as little as they wanted, without, I believe, compromising the potential of the work’s impact.
In some moments, the installation became a place specifically for sick, disabled, and neurodivergent bodies to inhabit and engage directly with the agential politics of the space. As observed, this looked like the waiting room becoming a space of public conversations, for joy, and for simply being—a contrast to a place that is most often private, quiet, solemn, and implies deficiency, of being ‘not enough.’
It was through observing these particular encounters—and in some cases participating in them—that I came to understand this waiting room as a place to have agency in a sick body’s inherent uncertainty, even if acting on that agency looked like doing nothing at all.