Sarah Pfohl
OSTEOGENESIS IMPERFECTA MODEL NO. 208
cyanotype photogram on pre-treated construction paper, 7.5x5.5 IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image shows turquoise shapes on a dark blue background. These shapes are long, thin, and overlapping. Viewers get the impression of large plants or creatures connected by reaching vines or tendrils.
OSTEOGENESIS IMPERFECTA MODEL NO. 209
cyanotype photogram on pre-treated construction paper, 7.5x5.5. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This painted image shows large pink shapes on a dark blue background. The pink shapes are square-ish with ragged edges. They are reminiscent of shells, bird wings, or continents in an ocean. Some of the shapes have an isthmus, line, or tail.
OSTEOGENESIS IMPERFECTA MODEL NO. 210
cyanotype photogram on pre-treated construction paper, 7.5x5.5. IMAGE DESCRIPTION: This image shows lime-green shapes on a dark green background. These lime=green shapes cover quite a large area of the background compared to the other two images. Viewers may get the impression of two lungs or bunches of grapes over a liver or a tri-fold shape that represents the ground.
Artist statement: A primary aspect of living in my body as a non-visibly disabled person is being socially misinterpreted, so grossly that at times my life comes under threat. Born non-visibly disabled, I manage multiple, incurable, very rare diagnoses while often passing for fine, a circumstance that confounds many notions of sickness, diagnosis, and identity. This work emerges from the spaces between my visible appearance, my internal, genetic reality, and the social experience of being disabled in a deeply ableist world. I offer these images with a desire to counter dominant, frequently negative, visual representations of diagnosed bodies.
When someone learns I’m sick they often ask, “What’s wrong with you?” and my response to this charged question is these pictures. I make photographs with shedded plants and forest structures I collect on prescribed daily walks. In the images, I lean into the obscurity created by the distance between sensitized substrate and the flora placed gently upon it. While recognizable elements remain, parts of each image melt into abstraction or become obscured. Rendered this way the botanical structures, a stand-in for me, surface models of 1) the inscrutable spaces I daily occupy, 2) my psychological experiences of illegibility, and 3) my wonky internal conditions as I imagine them.
Through this work I offer the viewer an experience of indistinct looking centered in metaphor and a photographic representation of disability rooted in the mysterious, obscure terrain in which non-visible chronic illness can expertly traffic. I hope you see the images as by turns challenging, resistant, beautiful, and weird. I hope the work foregrounds for you the presence and value of the unknown. These small talismans (sized in their original form to around 5x7”) embody a slant, highly personal rendering of my body-minds that pushes back against the gigantic medical and medicalized dossiers that subsume my life within the medical-industrial complex.