Comfort Corners
CURATORIAL STATEMENT:
When I first called Ellie Krakow to ask to see her work in person, I told her I was intrigued by the way her work speaks about the experience of a body in a clinical setting as both sterile and intimate. Her sculptures, despite their drollness and soft pastels, are brutally honest about the complex vulnerability of undergoing medical intervention. I was startled and titillated by their brazen legibility.
Ellie had already told me, after hearing me speak about my work, that she, like me, has Crohn’s disease. So, it was with a sense of familiarity that I told her about my experience moving to New York with a chronic disease. Hardly knowing anyone, I started going to a new doctor, a handsome older man on the Upper East Side. I was very sick at the time, so I had to visit his office frequently. I’d get there. I’d go into a small room. I’d disrobe. I’d stand naked before him and he’d examine me. And then I’d lie down on the examination table, and I’d roll over on my side and he would. . . and I paused here and gulped, and, very charitably, Ellie finished my sentence for me, “stick his finger up your ass.” Yes, I said, and that was the most intimate relationship in my life at that time, and not just because of the bodily penetration; he was also the guy that first noticed when I fell into a deep depression. He was the person looking out for me.
Perhaps inevitably, when I visited Ellie’s studio, we ended up standing among her works swapping tales of our time spent in hospitals. I began a story about walking the hallways at Mount Sinai, and as I spoke, I held up my hand in a gesture, not even thinking about it - it was the gesture of holding a rolling IV pole. Ellie laughed as she motioned to her piece, and said, “you were walking with your Hospital +1.” I laughed; yeah, I knew him well. On those walks he provided me with fluids. He provided me with pain meds. He provided me with support. That was another sort of intimacy.
For this exhibition Ellie and I selected three of her abstracted figurative sculptures that combine human forms with elements inspired by medical instruments and hospital architecture. Taking visual cues from the fleshy plastics and softened edges of hospital design, which Ellie refers to as “comfort corners,” the sculptures tease out ways that treatment and intervention shape bodily experience. Bodies morph into use-objects that fail at their presumed tasks. (W)heels can’t turn. Imaging screens display close-up photos of textures found in medical spaces instead of scientific data. And yet the flat humor of failure is paired with sensitive gestures of vulnerability and care, like the arm extended to lend support.
While viewing these pieces in her studio, I asked about how they are made. Ellie explained that she begins her sculptures by building a rigid anatomy that supports the fleshiness of the wet materials, like clay and gypsum, that she uses. She showed me the tools she uses to hone her pieces, as doctors might use medical instruments to examine and treat bodies. In the final stage of work, Ellie takes great care to smooth the scarred and labored surfaces created by her process. She admitted that her impulse to conceal imperfections may be an unconscious mirroring of living with invisible illness.
Ellie’s sculptures resonated with me, because I know the language they speak. I know that when you’re dealing with the weight of carrying an embattled body, you need that cold, highly engineered hospital equipment to hold you up. There was a time when I would have been embarrassed to talk about this knowledge, especially in relation to my work. After all, I came of age as an artist in the aughts, when one of the meanest things you could say to an artist was, “your work is personal” or, God forbid, “sincere.” I’m glad those days are behind us. We now seem to understand that what makes an artist is their lived experience. Of course, these issues are still embarrassing to talk about. Bodily orifices, and that most disgusting of bodily fluids, shit, still remain mostly taboo. But, shit or not, so many of us experience trauma at the hands of our medical system. Care, yes, and trauma. And so, to some degree, we all know this language. Ellie’s work speaks it with humor, tenderness, and courage that I’ve rarely seen.
-Alison Kudlow, curator