Image courtesy the artist.
We were recently asked that our next show include colour. The winter has been long, the snow relentless and gallery goers could use a bit of colour this spring! The Durham Art Gallery, a small contemporary rural art gallery, welcomes Breanne Jeethan’s solo exhibition The System is Broken.
Jeethan, a healthcare worker and recent MFA graduate from the University of Waterloo has a fascinating body of work. The pieces range in media from embroidery to curtains to monoprints and media arts, forming a cohesive narrative across the whole of the exhibition. And when I say body, I mean her work relates directly to the body as a place of injury, illness and trauma.
The artist is interested in medical imagery and spends her work week looking at images of ultrasounds, brain scans and other visuals that help medical professionals determine patient health. Jeethan has distorted and abstracted some of these images into her works in order to highlight profound inequalities resulting from the power structures of healthcare.
Walking into the Durham Art Gallery, you only are given a glimpse of the corner where 200 monoprints are mounted in a grid. They represent the daily intake of patients from the artist’s job working in a Toronto hospital’s emergency room. The monoprints took Jeethan a year to make, each one different but using similar objects that are found in hospitals, such as disposable gloves, gauze, and suture thread. It takes a moment to recognize them as clinical and sterile objects because they are so effectively remade into intriguing works on paper. This is where the colour comes in, albeit more sanguine than what visitors may have in mind.
The monoprints, as a collection, are titled Wound Dressings, and they remind us of a particular colour found within our bodily veins and vessels.
The benefit of working with artists is that the stories of how the works were created are just as interesting as what the finished works convey. At first, I thought that Jeethan’s embroidery works were done by machine – they are extremely precise and exact, and the threads so thin.
In fact, she did hand embroider images of cancer growths seen through an ultrasound in order to bring to light the specificities of cancers found in women, entitled Women’s Health.
Breanne Jeethan’s use of different media to collide the health care and art worlds is skillful and intriguing. These artworks can only be vaguely written about. It’s best to see them in person. The System is Broken is on now at the Durham Art Gallery until June 7th.
Amalia Savva is the Gallery Coordinator at Durham Art Gallery.