Join us to celebrate Sal’s multimedia art exhibition!
The show features a collection of paintings, drawings, wire sculpture, and animation.
You will also be invited to engage with interactive, participatory artwork.
RSVP for the Opening Celebration above or contact events@positiveexposure.org to schedule a viewing.
Artist Statement
As with many people who have ever been asked the question, Please Rate Your Pain on a Scale of 1-10: I know deeply the frustration and inadequacy of expressing one’s body/mind through the languages of boxes and binaries by way of numbers and words. My artwork explores how invisible experiences can be transformed through visual mediums, especially amidst reductive ways of thinking: sick/healthy, man/woman, visible/invisible. My complementary practices in graphic medicine, and gender and disability justice are deeply connected to an urgency in image-making, and to allow for unseen experiences to be brought to life and wrestled with.
I work across multimedia as both a practical and creative choice. As a person with chronic illness, my access needs change daily: jumping from acrylic to oil paint, to wire sculpture and typewritten text allows me to start and stop in a medium and on a timeline that my body dictates. Moreover, the limited color palette I work in mirrors the limitations that language offers for subject matter about pain and gender expression. I build visual constraints into my practice to allow for the act of creation itself to become expansive and liberatory.
My collaborative work combines oral history, visual world-building, and narrative medicine practices of co-authorship. Above all, I aim to center patient voices and translate lived experiences as a means to restore agency that is far-too commonly erased in the medical industrial complex.
Bio
SAL MARX is visual artist, creative director, and chronic illness patient advocate based in Brooklyn, NY. They have a M.S. in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, where they completed a multimedia capstone exploring the intersection between visual co-creation and disability justice. They studied Public Policy, Psychology, and Media Studies at Pomona College. Recently, they were a panelist at the Graphic Medicine Conference at Johns Hopkins, speaking about visual projects within chronic illness communities. They have conducted qualitative research culminating in A Graphic Guide to Palliative Care at the Vienna General Hospital, which is now being adapted for pediatric palliative care use at Akron Children’s Hospital. Sal’s work has been shown in the Lied Art Gallery, the Royal Alberta Museum, and has been published on various platforms including Intima, A Journal of Narrative Medicine; Johns Hopkins University Press, and WebMD.
Sal serves on the board of directors of Sick Futures Collective and the advocacy board of the Spondylitis Association of America.