Against the news landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic, images of the medical subject were no longer hidden discretely from view. We came to reckon with a more acute awareness of the fragility of the human body and its vulnerability to unseen and impersonal forces. We are all susceptible to illness; health is not guaranteed—nor is the stability of our healthcare system. We can no longer turn our gaze away from this reality.

This set of images from Jessica Thalmann’s ongoing series cut somewhere between the supports and collapse engages with representations of infirmity and care through the artist’s personal experience within the hospital system. In August of 2021, Thalmann’s mother suffered a brain aneurysm that left her fighting for her life in an ICU. Having to suddenly become a caregiver within this new reality, the artist documented her mother’s hospitalization including radiation treatments, MRIs, rehabilitation, and eventual recovery.

Thalmann’s process involves cutting, doubling, inverting, solarizing, and reassembling the original photographs to create an almost cubist dissection of space. This act of destruction and reconstruction builds on earlier work in which the artist uses a language of destabilizing alterations like folds and rips on photographs of different architectural sites that have meaning to her. Here, the primary alteration is that of the cut, which evokes the surgical precision of a scalpel and the messiness of an open wound. It speaks to the artist’s desire to materially and metaphorically examine medical institutions as sites that are haunted by trauma, and to reclaim some power over the emotional devastation of facing the mortality of a loved one.

This program of images forms part one of a three-part exhibition, This Unfathomable Weight, which animates outdoor lightboxes across the UTM campus and public billboards in Mississauga from September 2022 to August 2023. The exhibition grapples publicly with how we make sense of living through the massive crises of recent years. Through an understanding of trauma as a psychic rupture, where meaning-making has been suspended, deferred, or displaced, the project carves out space for reparative gestures across personal, societal, and spiritual registers.

 —Farah Yusuf