Xrays

I am interested in using medical imaging within my work, it is the basis of my collages already, but I also like the idea of displaying the work upon light boxes that mimic the viewing of xrays. As if placing it in that context tells the viewer to view it through a new language. For years I have been sent off for various tests, images and surgeries only to be brought back for results to my doctor. It is as if the medical imaging provided them with a new language with which to view me in. Until these results appeared they did not understand my issues or believe they exist. This new digital (medical imaging) language was the only thing they understood.  

"Nowadays, artists use X-ray technologies directly in the conception and making of their work, and as part of that art work, create shadow worlds that surprise the onlooker and solicit the steady appearance of reality: matter is no longer solid, permanent and opaque but becomes transparent, dissolves, multiplies and spectralises under the radiographic gaze. A shadow world of a ghostly appearance reaches out beyond the object’s surface and person’s skin and problematizes the discrete separation of inside and outside, Self and Other, the creative artist’s body and the body of art created. What could be conceived of as the aura of the authentic, indivisible Self is haunted by an Other shadow that questions the Self´s coherence and cohesion, and affects artist and art, subject and object, agent and patient, blurring their discreteness. Walter Benjamin saw the “aura” as that unique, singular quality of historical and temporal locatedness in its making that gives the work of art its authenticity, as opposed to the mechanised vilification of art in mass reproduction."

http://www.transformationsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Fell_Transformations26.pdf

Through the collaging of my own ultrasound imagery, I have managed to create a medical imprint of my own body. A ghostly shadow that has been created through the use of these technologies. It is almost as if this other ghostly body has been created over the years and now exists within me, an imprint of the original, the mark that has been left behind. 

David Maisel, History’s Shadow

Maisel continues, pointing out that the x-raying of objects has "historically been used for the structural examination of art and artifacts much as physicians examine bones and internal organs; it reveals losses, replacements, methods of construction, and internal trauma that may not be visible to the naked eye. The resulting prints of History's Shadow make the invisible visible, and express through photographic means the shape-shifting nature of time itself, and the continuous presence of the past contained within us."

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/04/using-x-rays-to-peer-inside-ancient-art-objects/