Bodies and light

Although the experiential and medical versions of our own bodies overlap and inform one another, the medical version can be extremely alienating. For example, most people faced with an MRI scan of their own body would not be able to interpret what they see.

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Figure. Linda Duvall, 2002. Bred in the Bone, installation view. Photo by: Courtesy Floating Gallery, Winnipeg

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Figure. Linda Duvall, 2002. Image from Bred in the Bone (detail). Backlit photograph. Photo by: Courtesy Floating Gallery, Winnipeg

Saskatchewan artist Linda Duvall wrestles with her emotional responses to the detached, highly focused imagery of medicine in Bred in the Bone, an exhibition featured at Winnipeg's Floating Gallery Nov. 15 – Dec. 14, 2002. After her mother's death and autopsy had revealed a hereditary condition that no one in the family had known about, Duvall underwent magnetic resonance imaging of her whole body. In her work, Duvall does not disclose what the disease in question is, for this is an artistic, not medical, exploration. Instead, she wants to understand the results of medical imaging as more than an indication of where her anatomy fits against a certain range of normalcy. As she writes in her artist's statement, “I felt very much that I was excluded from the potential offered by these images [because] I was not able to see the information contained within them, in the way that I felt I would approach most other photographic imagery.”

Duvall enlarged twelve tiny, 1.25 cm х 3.75 cm sections of medical film onto 50 cm х175 cm sections of regular photographic paper, laminated them, and backlit them to mimic the way medical images are viewed. She then turned to what has become one of the most personal, informal kinds of photography: family snapshots. From them, she pinpricked outlines of members of three or four generations of her family into the MRIs, dot by painstaking dot. Some groupings contain over a dozen people, so dots cluster up to the edges of the film. In others, a close-up of a single individual trails more sparsely across the stark black-and-white MRI. Because they are backlit, the family figures glow, invoking constellations and perhaps glancing toward astrology as another system of knowledge.

The family members are brighter than the ghostly MRIs, as the pinpricks are direct holes to the light panels. Yet both image types are elusive in different ways. Each of the twelve panels is untitled. The body parts are so segmented that they are usually unrecognizable to the nonmedical viewer. Here, one sees what might be a section of brain; there, a femur seems apparent — or is it an extreme close-up of a finger bone? Scale is impossible to determine. As for the people, they are perforated and unsubstantial; intricate checkered and flowered fabric patterns are embedded with great care, but skin is simply outlined. Thus the humanizing element functions as a limited communication as well.

Duvall's attention to the family members' clothes connects Bred in the Bone with earlier works in which she uses fabric as a metaphor for the way secrets are kept within or beneath a skin of normal self-presentation. The installation Tea Gone Cold (2000), for example, presented fabric-covered stones on an insubstantial fabric table as the physical residue of a family's former presence.

Duvall originally studied photography, and since the late 1980s her work has evolved into innovative installations that often include sound and video recordings and motion sensors. She also explores virtual installations with two interactive pieces produced in 2002: Stained Linen, a Web-based project; and 933-CALL, a series of telephone voicemail boxes telling segments of a story that the listener navigates at will.

Thus Bred in the Bone is a rare return for Duvall to photography-based work. With MRIs, she is able to look under her own skin, but she relieves her sense of medical alienation by looking outward to other bodies, not by looking further inward at her own. The identity that emerges is one of a person in connection, grappling to understand that there is no miraculous medical cure-all: genetic mysteries retain secrecy even when we use the most complex technology to see to the bone.

Meg Walker Writer and artist Winnipeg, Man.