Pharma Infinity Dance

My interdisciplinary art practice focuses on the diversity of the lived experience of mental health difference, and the impact of the stigma and inequity of access to care. I utilize an archive of medication guides, prescription bottles, historical and psychiatric resource materials that reflect mental health conditions and systemic and historical legacies to find strength in vulnerability.

In this video, I threaded my collection of prescription bottles with galvanized wire to create the shape of a large infinity loop sculpture. Created with an iPhone 8, I dance through the aisles of a CVS pharmacy with my Infinity sculpture to reflect on side effects, the intersections of treatment, access, and stigma as well as their contradictions.

I play with scale to magnify and make visible the relationship between medical conditions, BigPharma, access, side effects and care. This body of work developed based on my personal experiences as someone who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a way to grasp and translate their meaning through the lens of disability justice and mad pride.

This is an extension of my continued interest to apply personal narrative as a way to share experiences to disrupt stereotypes and to reflect on neurodiversity, contemporary issues and an intersectional identity through installation, multimedia, video and performative actions and ultimately to make the invisible visible and animate the inanimate.