Concentrate is an exploration of resilience, transformation, and the deliberate act of finding possibility and joy within the experience of chronic illness. Each piece reflects the artist’s journey navigating survival, medical trauma, and the creative potential found in reimagining limitations. Through unconventional materials—pill bottle caps, mirrors, medical objects, miniature figures, and vibrant acrylics—the work challenges traditional ideas of value and purpose, offering new perspectives on connection, transformation, and the containers we inhabit.
The exhibition includes works like No Big Deal, a series of 60 framed 8x10 acrylic paintings created with pill bottle caps as paint brushes, symbolizing the artist’s 60 chemotherapy infusions over a decade of treatment. This deeply personal series layers textured orange and blue forms with miniature train figures, evoking themes of survival, connection, and transformation. Each piece reflects on the precarious balance between life and death, with the act of painting becoming a meditative process of endurance and self-reclamation.
60 Degrees of Remission is an interactive art piece that transforms survival into a communal act of discovery and reflection. It consists of 60 individually signed and numbered 5x7 cards, each stamped with a single orange dot using the cap of a pill bottle as a paintbrush. Mounted on a large metal sheet framed with an old-fashioned wooden frame, the cards conceal the word “remission,” handwritten in robin’s egg blue on the metal. Visitors are invited to take a card with them, symbolically “diluting” the illness and reducing its lingering power. As the cards are removed, the hidden word is gradually revealed, turning an individual journey into a collective moment of revelation.
Other highlights include Planks-a-Lot Mini-Me, which reimagines agency and perspective through a 1:84 scale miniature version of the artist exploring unexpected spaces, and The Container is the Medicine, a work born from the realization that a trash can full of used pill bottles mirrors the pill bottles themselves: both are containers fulfilling their purpose to hold. This piece challenges viewers to reconsider the boundaries between trash and value, illness and wellness, and life and death, asking whether what we discard might hold the key to transformation.
Anchored in a Queer, Chicano art ethos, Concentrate resists assumptions about what it means to be whole or complete. By reframing trauma, survival, and illness as opportunities for reimagining and connection, the work invites viewers to see beyond conventional limits toward a world full of joy, wonder, and infinite possibility.
The exhibition includes works like No Big Deal, a series of 60 framed 8x10 acrylic paintings created with pill bottle caps as paint brushes, symbolizing the artist’s 60 chemotherapy infusions over a decade of treatment. This deeply personal series layers textured orange and blue forms with miniature train figures, evoking themes of survival, connection, and transformation. Each piece reflects on the precarious balance between life and death, with the act of painting becoming a meditative process of endurance and self-reclamation.
60 Degrees of Remission is an interactive art piece that transforms survival into a communal act of discovery and reflection. It consists of 60 individually signed and numbered 5x7 cards, each stamped with a single orange dot using the cap of a pill bottle as a paintbrush. Mounted on a large metal sheet framed with an old-fashioned wooden frame, the cards conceal the word “remission,” handwritten in robin’s egg blue on the metal. Visitors are invited to take a card with them, symbolically “diluting” the illness and reducing its lingering power. As the cards are removed, the hidden word is gradually revealed, turning an individual journey into a collective moment of revelation.
Other highlights include Planks-a-Lot Mini-Me, which reimagines agency and perspective through a 1:84 scale miniature version of the artist exploring unexpected spaces, and The Container is the Medicine, a work born from the realization that a trash can full of used pill bottles mirrors the pill bottles themselves: both are containers fulfilling their purpose to hold. This piece challenges viewers to reconsider the boundaries between trash and value, illness and wellness, and life and death, asking whether what we discard might hold the key to transformation.
Anchored in a Queer, Chicano art ethos, Concentrate resists assumptions about what it means to be whole or complete. By reframing trauma, survival, and illness as opportunities for reimagining and connection, the work invites viewers to see beyond conventional limits toward a world full of joy, wonder, and infinite possibility.
SICK ART
How do we measure our health?
How do we measure our wellness?
How do we measure our levels of sickness?
What does one do with over 300 used plastic pill bottles?
What does one do with over 150 empty vials & syringes?
What does one do with the remnants of $100,000 worth of medications and procedures?
What can one do while in 5 hour long chemo treatments - a total of 60 times (300 hours)?
Why do we manufacture strong containers that carry medicine to weak bodies?
Why can't we focus on healing instead of fighting insurance claims and killing ourselves at work in an effort to stay alive one more day?
How do we tell the story of our struggles?
How do we heal?
Learn to love trash.
Start to refuse.
How do we measure our wellness?
How do we measure our levels of sickness?
What does one do with over 300 used plastic pill bottles?
What does one do with over 150 empty vials & syringes?
What does one do with the remnants of $100,000 worth of medications and procedures?
What can one do while in 5 hour long chemo treatments - a total of 60 times (300 hours)?
Why do we manufacture strong containers that carry medicine to weak bodies?
Why can't we focus on healing instead of fighting insurance claims and killing ourselves at work in an effort to stay alive one more day?
How do we tell the story of our struggles?
How do we heal?
Learn to love trash.
Start to refuse.
