American photographer in Tirana with ‘Uniform’ exhibition

TIRANA, June 27 – American photographer Elizabeth M. Claffey has been invited to display in Tirana her most recent work exploring the relationship between medical practices and life experience. Through images, personal narrative, and installation her creative research shows how individual interactions with medical practices and institutions can have a lasting influence on one’s quality of life and how the clinical examination of intimate physicality can cause a person to view his or her body as a foreign or feared object.
The exhibition at the newly opened Miza gallery situated close to the Law Faculty will be open from July 1 to 15.
“Elizabeth M. Claffey’s “Hospital Gowns,” and “The Waiting” both investigate the often cold and stilted experience individuals have within the health system. The medical apparatus, its hardware, architecture, and personnel, are largely focused on efficiency, economy, and hygiene, rather than humanity and nurturing,” says Ryan Mandell, Artist and Curator.
Because the human body is both the subject and the object of this system, the patient experiences a rift between the psychological and physical self, leading to feelings of anxiety and alienation. Through image, form, and medium, Claffey’s work articulates the complex relationship between the individual and their own physical self within this context.
“Hospital Gowns” consists of photographic images of anonymous individuals of both sexes with diverse body types printed on hospital gowns. The breadth of individuals represented in this series suggests that exposure to the medical system is a leveling experience, detached from issues of sex and race. By virtue of the photographic transfer process employed, the images of the bodies appear blurred and fragmentary. This result, coupled with the absence of a face or head, suggest that a weakened or degraded facsimile is all that remains of a former self. The hospital gown, with its apparent starchiness, transparency, and general feeling of cheapness, makes an appropriate substrate for these images, not only because the physical object immediately references a medical environment, but also because its characteristics conjure associations of vulnerability, impermanence, and the transitory. Furthermore, the method of display in which the gowns are suspended by a thin line emphasizes the experience of these human figures as apparition rather than concrete. This suggests a reduction of the patient from physical reality to abstract concept.
“The Waiting” is a video that pictures the artist clad in a hospital gown, seated uncomfortably in an austere, presumably medical, environment waiting for the doctor to arrive. The visual austerity of the composition, the figure’s suspension in the center of the frame and distance from the camera, and the excruciating length of time and physical discomfort, all lead to feelings of alienation, control, and vulnerability.