Ribcage



a white, muscled, gender non-conforming person wearing boxing gloves and viewed from the back stands in a ribcage shower; this image is projected onto the wall of a tiled bathroom
detail view of leather boxing gloves in sitz bath
detail image of a horizontal pipe, or rib, in the rib cage shower
The ribcage shower from the early 20th century doubly acts to stage this piece: the site where it was filmed is also the site where it was projected. The shower was designed for its imagined therapeutic effects, though the associations it provokes to a contemporary audience are likely closer to bathhouse and bondage than bowel heath. The spectre of the therapeutic is fraught in less comically bawdy ways, however, especially for the many candidates for therapy and reform, among them gender non-conforming people. This scene is staged as a post-bout shower, with gloves still on and the weariness of a fight still quite legible – or perhaps some version of cage fight might be argued to still be in play, as the form of the ribcage shower becomes a clear material metaphor for the more sinister effects of what was – or continues to be – understood as diagnosis and healing.

projection, sound, antique ribcage
shower installation
dimensions variable 8″w x 12″l x 6’h
2010