Catherine Parker // Proust and Medicine Prior to undertaking the project to read In Search of Lost Time in the coronavirus era, the only biographical fact I knew about Proust was that he insisted on completing his landmark novel in the cocoon of a cork-lined room—an idiosyncratic signature—but perhaps one that would have resonated in…
Category: Arts and Creativity
Pedagogy of the Pandemic: Narrative Medicine and Radical Empathy
Sayantani DasGupta, Author // Ibraim Nascimento, Painter // There is a rupture in higher education and in that rupture is an opportunity. As novelist Arundhati Roy (2020) has written, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway…
The Art of Dissection
Jac Saorsa: Artist-in residence// (The following is an extract from my PhD in creative writing. A work in progress!) Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with…
Artists in the Aftermath : The COVID-19 Crisis and Its Repercussions on Artists and Their Practice
Pauline Picot // PROTOCOL The paper you are about to read does not pretend to have the scope nor the scientific rigor of a comprehensive survey. I do not claim to have reached any general conclusions regarding the matter that I am about to address ; rather, I attempted to probe a mix of thoughts and…
Contagious Exhibits: Curating the Plague
Diana Novaceanu // The exhibit In Time of Plague: Five Centuries of Infectious Disease in the Visual Arts opened in January 1988 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It aimed to showcase both the “changing conventions” of illness representation and the ways in which artists dealt with “the gradual emergence of…
Pathogenesis: A Visual Diary of COVID-19
Jac Saorsa, Artist-in-Residence // All images created for this special issue by Jac Saorsa, Synapsis Artist-in-Residence. Copyright Jac Saorsa, 2020.
Proust in Pandemic: Part I
Catherine Parker // Saturday, March 14, was my last weekend call day as a third-year medical student on the vascular surgery service. That day, I spent twelve hours at New York Presbyterian Hospital. I also learned that elective surgeries had been cancelled to make Intensive Care Units out of operating rooms. So, it came as…
When words fail…
Jac Saorsa: Artist-in-residence// In my work I make a lot of portraits. Some are of real people but most are ‘constructs’ – images created from my imagination, even if based on reality. All originate from some form of profound emotion. In all of the portraits I make, it is the eyes that, for me, are…
Light and Shadows: Through the Window
Sarah Roth // It is Sunday in Florida, and my family holds our breath as my mother breathes. We watch the rise and fall of her chest.
This Music is Our Music
Erica Cao // The hallway opens up to a room where trophies and boomboxes line a fireplace mantel which emits a warm blanket-glow covering histories of unspoken trauma: abuse, violence, deaths. Children’s Aid and Family Services of NJ houses girls who are an average age of nine years old. There’s about eight girls in each home….
