Curating and Project Direction

In this solo exhibition, artist Dominic Quagliozzi presents recent work informed by his lived experience with Cystic Fibrosis and as a recipient of a double lung transplant in 2015. Since that time, he has loosely documented the changes in his body through paintings, sculptures, works on paper and video. His art also functions as talismans through which to channel change that is self-empowering, and indeed, more able to be controlled, flipping the inevitable estrangement he experienced within the medical industrial complex as a patient of a serious and life-threatening surgery.

Included in the exhibition are three reconstituted hospital gowns made from various materials (using hospital gown material as a starting point): Suit (2019), Parachute (2022) and Teddy Bear Clinic (2024), a pink therapeutic thoracic pillow fashioned into a lung swaddled by a diced teddy bear, entitled Co-parenting (2024), Help Me Up (2020), a looping video installation of limbs against sky, which are simultaneously falling and reaching, and Anatomy Drawings 1 & 2 (2024), a mimicry of the hands and arms in the companion video. The drawings have been beautifully crafted from betadine, an antiseptic that provides infection protection commonly used before surgery, along with colored pencils, acrylic gel, and thread on cut paper which has been sewed together by a zig-zag pattern, alluding to surgical stitching.

The title of the exhibition is taken from one of the first modern anatomy books by Andreas Vesalius entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Of the Structure of the Human Body) (1555). The themes of the Vesalius text have inspired Quagliozzi’s work, through the history of studying the human body, and current trends within the medical humanities to extend those histories from a strictly medical world into a dialogue on the social, cultural and political circumstances surrounding health and wellness. By emphasizing the human in medical humanities, Quagliozzi’s objects and their accompanying narratives contribute to this evolving critical field in ways that are playful, introspective and reflective of the fragility and vulnerability of chronic illness.

Artist Dominic Quagliozzi is a multidisciplinary artist and arts educator. His work reconciles his lived experience with chronic illness and disability to explore personal histories and the domestication of illness. He received an MFA in Studio Arts from Cal State University, Los Angeles and a BA in Sociology from Providence College. His work is in the permanent collection at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum and in the Rhizome.org digital archive. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Calgary Contemporary in Canada and Casula Powerhouse Art Centre in New South Wales, Australia.

Curator Amanda Cachia has an established career profile as a curator, consultant, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality. She is Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of the Arts Leadership Graduate Program at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston. Her first book, The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique, was released in December 2024 by Temple University Press. She has a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego.