The artwork installation, To protect their comfort is to sacrifice yours, explores disability through both lived experience and its medicalized representation. The work focuses on the gap between what disability can feel like and how it is defined through clinical language and imagery. It draws from my personal experiences with disability, physical pain, mental strain, and isolation while also critiquing the expectation that disability must be temporary or overcome. It further engages with contemporary reality that disability remains a cultural taboo despite being the only marginalized condition that anyone can enter at any moment, which exposes the instability of the human condition itself.

The installation combines drawing, painting, and cyanotype with projection on a quilt to create a space that emphasizes bearing witness to pain. Rather than offering a resolution, the installation space positions the viewer as an active witness, confronting the common, widespread discomfort with observing others’ despair that is neither mediated nor resolved. Three graphite drawings (22”x30”) are shown within the space, showcasing surrealist depictions of my body, including a figure merging with a mattress and a diptych depicting an idealized, blissful version of myself being chased by my genetics and predispositions. These images employ uncanny elements to convey exhaustion, self-surveillance, the pressure to perform, and the psychological response to that strain. Much of my imagery, due to its nature, is informed in part by Frida Kahlo, whose work has historically translated personal pain into direct visual language.

Between the single drawing and the diptych is a 4x3 ft acrylic painting that extends into this psychological environment, illustrating me from a bird's-eye view, with my limbs stretching across the couch on which my figure sits, appearing immobilized. Smaller canvases extend outward from the main canvas, signaling towards the aesthetic of computer virus pop-ups, which serve as literal and conceptual interruptions of the psyche. These forms reference obsessive thought patterns and suggest how mental and physical experiences overlap and reinforce one another.

A large quilt cyanotype, approximately 3x4 ft, incorporates MRI scans of my parents and me. These images are both medical documentation and a personal archive that address inheritance and the persistence of disability and pain across generations. The use of medical imagery is informed by the artists Panteha Abareshi and Ted Meyer, who both reframe clinical material through lived experience documented through photography and prints. A projected stop-motion of my figure occupies the center of the quilt, positioning my typically privatized, vulnerable pain as a public spectacle.

This project builds on earlier work on visibility, disability, and the human experience to engage more directly with embodiment within space. It resists simplified narratives of recovery, such as the overcoming narrative or being reduced to inspiration porn. Instead, it centers on the ongoing experience of occupying space with a story that confronts pain, mortality, and our shared precarity.