Corinne May Botz

inArt

Medical Fields
Death and Dying, Essential medicines/treatment, Internal Medicine, Medical Diagnosis, Neglected Diseases, Psychology, Rare Syndromes

Creative Forms
Conceptual art
Mixed media
Photography
Video art

Website / Blog
www.corinnebotz.com/

Places
Brooklyn, New York

”For over the past two decades, my work has constructed photographic narratives that address themes such as trauma, mortality, gender,and the perception of space. Throughout my art practice, I have been interested in psychology and empathy. I use the camera as a license to enter the lives of others and to access spaces that are usually restricted. Although I take the documentary tradition as a point of departure, I am interested in the revelations that emerge when fact and imagination, artifice and reality collide.”

Corinne May Botz

“”Bedside Manner” is a series of photographs and an 18-minute video that explores the little-known world of standardized patient simulations. Standardized patients (SPs) are professional medical actors who are trained to present particular sets of symptoms in order to help medical students improve their diagnostic skills and bedside manner. The history of Western medicine is connected to issues of spectatorship, display, and pathology. I’m interested in how visual imagery has been used historically to represent the body and construct medical interactions. For instance, the famous nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot presented hysterical female patients in an amphitheater and routinely photographed them acting according to enforced expectations, negatively linking women and pathology. My work examines the burden of medical history and the clinical gaze. Empathic experience can connect, or it can replace the other’s pain with the projection of the observer. To be a “patient” is to be observed, reliant on a doctor’s interpretation and understanding of one’s body. My photographs document SPs and highlight the craft of the staged tableaux: the work gains its power by straddling the line between fact and fiction. Even though the standardized patient may be performing, this doesn’t mean the encounter isn’t “real”; acting and staged representations inform the interaction between patients and doctors in important ways. In order to express their suffering, real patients must learn how to act in doctors’ offices. Through simulated pain, we start to become aware of our empathic processes and the ethics of seeing. ”Bedside Manner” prompts larger questions about authenticity, representation and perception.”

Corinne May Botz, about “Bedside Manner”

Explore “Bedside Manner” in BENRUBI GALLERY, in THE NEW YORKER, in PELICAN BOMB, in WIRED

In the short film "Bedside Manner", neurologist Dr. Alice Flaherty plays herself as doctor, patient and standardized patient in a narrative that forces spectators to decipher what is authentic in the main character’s narrative. To paraphrase Flaherty: she is a doctor learning how to be a patient, in order to teach doctors how to be better doctors. In regards to the discourse concerning empathy, we are left not only thinking about what patients feel but what student-doctors feel as they go through the process of becoming an “authority". ©Corinne May Botz

“Lori,” from the series “Bedside Manner”. ©Corinne May Botz / Courtesy Benrubi Gallery, NYC

"Life Support" from the series “Bedside Manner” ©Corinne May Botz / Courtesy Benrubi Gallery, NYC

“Operating Room No. 1,” from the series “Bedside Manner” ©Corinne May Botz / Courtesy Benrubi Gallery, NYC

Void from the series "Parameters" / "Agoraphobia is the fear of public places from which escape may be difficult or embarrassing in the event of a panic attack. Individuals with agoraphobia have difficulty leaving their houses, and restrict themselves to a zone of safety that can range in scale from a few blocks to a bed. This spatial condition emerged during the birth of the modern city, and cannot be separated from the critique that modernist space is produced for and by men. Known as the “housewives disease,” it is estimated that 80 to 85 percent of agoraphobics are women. Ultimately, it is the delicate relationship between space and self - the fear of loosing control over one’s body and one’s place in the world - that forces individuals into hermetically sealed spaces. I sought out agoraphobic volunteers from a variety of sources (online support groups, Craig’s List, clinics, classified ads, etc.). I met with eighteen individuals in total: fifteen women and three men. In the mode of a forensic psychiatrist or anthropologist on a home-visit, I photographed the interior arrangements and safety objects that the individuals accumulated as a means of coping with their anxieties. Although the figure is absent from these images, the overdetermined objects are surrogates for the individuals and serve as a form of portraiture. Countering the dread of horror vacui, many of these interiors are marked by over accumulation and a confluence of knick-knacks. Agoraphobics retreat inside their homes because it is a space they can control. The home is repeatedly described as both a haven and prison. I photographed the interiors arrangements in a straightforward manner, utilizing strobe lighting to highlight the sculptural foundation of the images and to connect them with high art, thus challenging modernity’s disavowal of the domestic and decorative. Like the objects I photographed (talisman that help agoraphobes navigate public spaces and entrances to the outside world of nature and memories through the interior), my photographs are mobile objects that extend the parameters of my subjects’ safety zones. By volunteering for my project and allowing me to enter their private space, the agoraphobes’ indicated a desire to extend the boundary of their space. The exhibition of the photographs relocates highly personal spaces into a public sphere." ©Corinne May Botz

Corinne May Botz

BIO
Corinne Botz is a Brooklyn-based photographic artist, writer and filmmaker. Botz works on long-term projects; her process involves photographing, extensive research, recording oral histories and videos, archiving the material and presenting inter-related exhibitions and books. She often focuses her camera on the residue of daily life that signal expired moments of normalcy before trauma. Botz’s photographs have been internationally exhibited at such institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois; Wurttembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; De Appel, Amsterdam; and Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK. She has had solo exhibitions at Benrubi Gallery and Bellwether Gallery in New York City; Hemphill Fine Arts in Washington D.C. and RedLine Gallery in Denver, Colorado. Botz is the author of Haunted Houses (Monacelli Press, 2010) and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Monacelli Press, 2004). Her work has been reviewed in publications such as The NewYork Times, Foam Magazine, Bookforum, Art Papers, Modern Painters, Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, Exit, Slate, Time: Lightbox and Ciel Variable. Botz earned her BFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art and her MFA from Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College. She is the recipient of residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Atlantic Center for the Arts; Akademie Schloss Solitude and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has received grants from New York Foundation for the Arts and the Jerome Foundation. Botz is on the faculty of International Center of Photography and John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Botz is represented by Benrubi Gallery in NYC.