MFA VISUAL ART
Sam Wrigglesworth
In the video, two silhouettes kiss against a celestial grey, sending ripples through the background. Using photo techniques from aeronautical engineering, Wrigglesworth is visualizing the breath exchanged between the kissers. By making the air relatively opaque, Wrigglesworth shows the approaching kissers as not only exposed to each other but as already touching. Their intimacy is abstract but nevertheless evokes Gran Fury’s iconic “Read My Lips” poster created during the height of the AIDS crisis. What happens when not only kissing but even proximity is risky? Prior struggles of queer people for health are juxtaposed to the perennial condition of Long Covid.
Long Covid also informs the artist’s sculpture practice. The various versions of DIY air purifiers evoke democratization and the dissemination of medical knowledge. As a part of the mutual-aid group they founded, Ohio Clean Air Coalition, Wrigglesworth conducts community workshops making these inexpensive machines. In the exhibition, a steel version of the air purifier design is studded with blown glass forms—forms, that is, created directly from breath and then inserted into cavities modeled on the MRI scans of the artist’s internal organs. The collective and the artist’s body, imaging and breathing, are thus modalities for experiments in seizing the means to clean air and, by extension, to restore health.
Wrigglesworth’s photograms affirm an etymological connection between gauze and Gaza. That ubiquitous material, used for healing and holding together wounded bodies, carries traces of the name of that place where genocidal violence has left not a single fully functioning hospital. These undulating and dense, weblike grids arise as two tissues—photo paper and gauze—touch in the darkroom. Their embrace doesn’t heal a wound as much as it politicizes healing in the face of the unceasing destruction of Palestine—a health crisis in which Ohio State, and its complex of medical institutions, remains complicit.
— Ahura Sultan, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Student