Exhibit Essay 2

 What’s more important in our lives than having good health? Yet, something as simple as health remains a controversial topic throughout time. Many questions come to mind when one begins to approach the idea of well-being. What qualifies as a health matter? Emotional distress? Modification of bodies? What dictates health, besides an economic based industry? When it comes to it, health as a topic can be explored and debated in dozens of different ways. In the exhibit Wonder Women 12: A Health Survey, several facets of the broad topic of “health” gets explored in varying creative ways that makes one reflect on the topic at hand.  

Sharon Lee De La Cruz produces a short zine titled The Itchies. (fig. 1) With a bold illustration style that is reminiscent of a childhood cartoon, De La Cruz puts forth a memoir about her time abroad, and the issues she had facing an unknown allergy. With rashes and itchies plaguing her skin, the creator spent some time struggling with her physician to solve the issue. The zine broaches a common issue the health industry riddles itself with, the issue of stigma and bias that affecting patients’ diagnosis and treatment. This issue particularly affects minorities, especially people of color. De La Cruz’s personal story about how she had to struggle with getting her doctor to find the real root of the issue is something more common than it should be. In a different vein, Kimberly Drew wrote in her short book This is What I Know About Art, that “From a very young age, [she has] known “[her] lane.” While she may be discussing her role in the art world, the same can be said about the large percentages of people excluded or left behind in the health industry. When doctors insist they know more about your body than you do, as De La Cruz experienced, it is essentially the same as being told to stay in your lane. 

Additionally, in the zine, De La Cruz does something especially interesting in her work, using humor to help gain audience approval. In the Guerilla Girls book, Confessions of the Guerilla Girls, a passage says “[w]hen so many individual women artists are struggling for recognition, what is is it that has enabled the Guerilla Girls to establish, in less than a decade, the kind of notoriety…. The Girls’ particular combination of subversive theatrics and outrages flaunting of convention finds a ready audience. In an age of sound bytes, their one-liners fly like barbed arrows….” Much the same can be said about Sharon Lee De La Cruz, who uses humor and sarcasm in The Itchies to get her message across with the same biting activism. Spreads like the one pictured below help captivate the audience into relating to the character of the zine. (fig. 2) Like the Guerilla Girls, De La Cruz uses humor as a weapon to spread ideas across. 

Weirds in Sibley Park Map by Mary Jeys (fig. 3) is a watercolor painting depicting a map of colorful blobs, to put it simply. Mary Jeys describes the map as an illustration of her modulation between physical, mental, and emotional feelings throughout the pandemic. Varying colors work with and against one another on watercolor paper to help show the fluctuating states of being she describes. The image works particularly well in showing discombobulation felt during a worldwide pandemic. The shapes of the “blobs” used by Jeys looks vaguely reminiscent of a lumpy brain. With each color and individual form representing its own emotion or pain, the image comes together as a whole to show the free-for-all the past year and a half has felt like. On writing about photographs, Susan Sontag, in her book On Photography, writes “[t]o photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” Similarly, the way Jeys translating feelings of all kinds into simple shapes and colors, feels like the same kind of “appropriation” Sontag wrote about. Jeys’ painting has success in showing that one’s personal health is not one aspect-- just as each color is different, everything we have felt in the past year, from fatigue to migraines to burn-out, comes together under this colorful composition. It comes off as particularly effective in its simplicity. 

While Sharon Lee De La Cruz and Mary Jeys create two very different pieces concerning varying aspects of the word “health”, both artists have success in captivating the audience, relating to them, and showcasing their own personality and individuality in their pieces.  

fig. 1
The Itchies by Sharon Lee De La Cruz

fig. 2
The Itchies by Sharon Lee De La Cruz

fig. 3
Weirds in Sibley Park by Mary Jeys

fig. 4
Weekly Selfie by Miranda Barrington