Altered X-Rays (Edited Version)
I began my altered x-ray project in the early nineties using the exposed x-ray films of men who had died of AIDS. The films had been given to me by my internist, an infectious disease specialist who had treated those represented over long periods and saved the films out of his attachment to those who had died. I too had lost and was losing friends and colleagues to the AIDS epidemic. My early altered x-rays serve as elegies for those who died, and act as reminders of our vulnerability and mortality.
In the late nineties, I began to include sonograms and neuro-magnetic resonance films of strangers, colleagues, and friends representing a wider range of ailments and conditions. Exposed films continue to supply material support and provisional imagery. These “found objects” serve as my starting point and inspiration. Additions most often refer to unseen and overlooked places, events, and material objects, quotidian aspects of my social and personal engagements.
In recent works, I deface the films with cuts and erasures. I embed photographs of ancient architecture taken from old, discarded books. These interventions disrupt the empirical method of medical science and the seamless representation of the medicalized body. Neither the interventions nor the medical records they contest win out. A curious aspect of the altered x rays is that, although replete with recognizable images, the subjects represented are often of a type not frequently seen or acknowledged. Direct and improvisatory, they derive from (and are driven by) uncertainty.