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At 19, I was diagnosed with major depression and generalized anxiety disorder and dropped out of college. At 20, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. For the past 15 years I have relied on a cocktail of medication and a number of psychiatrists to keep me functioning in polite society. In that time I’ve developed a complicated love/hate relationship with the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries and the ways in which they deal with, provide for and manipulate their consumers.
In Structurally Unsound, I create a world in which the relationship between patient and doctor is ambiguous, and the helpfulness of their medications questionable. Using the brightly colored paraphernalia of the prescription drug industry as a landscape and children’s toys as my characters, I inject a sense of playfulness into the life and death subject many deal with every day.
I constructed my pillbox city on top of a light box I built out of wood, Plexiglas and fluorescent tubes. After painting my tiny doctors and their distressed patients, I placed them in situations that could be viewed in a number of ways. Is the psychiatrist keeping his patient from leaping or giving him a little shove? Helping or hurting? Good or bad? Life or death?
I then photographed these scenes at close range, from “inside” the city to give them a life of their own, and to elevate the figures from toys to something more. In playing with different scenarios as a child would in a dollhouse, I gained a sense of control over the part of my life that is often out of control.
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