Megan Bent: Patient / Belongings | form & concept gallery

Director's Note
Jordan Eddy
The Covid-19 pandemic was the impetus for this exhibition—and an impediment to its creation. To produce the ongoing series in Patient / Belongings, Megan Bent has wrestled with lockdowns and isolation, insomnia and fearful distraction, supply chain issues and rising material costs. She has processed the broad social and cultural phenomena of this era with a rage that often feels all-consuming. Sometimes that anger feeds her creativity; in other moments it plunges her into despair.

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Artist Statement
Megan Bent
In March of 2020, my fear of catching the Coronavirus became palpable. "Don't worry." an acquaintance assured me "only the sick and elderly will die." I am chronically ill and immunocompromised.

I Don't Want To Paint A Silver Lining Around It, the series that appears in this exhibition, is my personal reflection of being high risk in the pandemic. It is also my response to the outside world's demand that disabled people be acceptable losses for personal convenience or for corporate profit.
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The Process

The chlorophyll printing process (where one print/exposure may take anywhere from 8 to 72 hours) relies on flexibility, interdependence with nature, and echoes my experience of the disability concept of Crip Time*; living in a body/mind that values slowing down, connection, and care over speed and production.
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Installation Views

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Artworks
About the Artist

Megan Bent is a lens-based artist interested in the malleability of photography and the ways image-making can happen beyond using a traditional camera. This interest started to occur after the diagnosis of a progressive chronic illness. Drawn to image-making processes that reject perfection, accuracy, or any certainty in results, she is interested instead in processes that reflect and embrace her disabled experience; especially interdependence, impermanence, care, and slowness.
Further Reading
- Abled-Bodied Leftists Cannot Abandon Disabled Solidarity to “Move On” From COVID, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Truthout, October 1, 2022
- Disabled Oracles and the Coronavirus, Alice Wong, Disability Visibility, 2020
- I’m disabled and need a ventilator to live. Am I expendable during this pandemic?, Alice Wong, Vox, 2020
- Coronavirus: How These Disabled Activists Are Taking Matters Into Their Own (Sanitized) Hands, Matthew Green for KQED, 2020
- Death by a Thousand Words: COVID-19 and the Pandemic of Ableist Media, Imani Barbarin, Refinery 29
- What It’s Like to Be Black and Disabled in America, Shalene Gupta, The Atlantic
- Sick Woman Theory, Johanna Hedva
- Access Intimacy: The Missing Link, Mia Mingus
- 10 Principles of Disability Justice, Sins Invalid
- RX/27 - Spastic Walking, RX Museum Art & Reflection in Medicine

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