Pressure Systems a text by Elizabeth Buhe

Sitting atop the crinkling paper of the procedure chair in a doctor’s office, we speculate on what the practitioner might say. Depending on our outlook or point of view, we might feel anxiety, relief, curiosity, dread – especially if we expect to return to this place for the foreseeable future. Footsteps, a knock. “Let’s see,” the doctor says when she comes in, inspecting our bodies. She offers a synopsis of our condition(s), immediately dashing the prospect that we won’t need to return. The objectification of the patient by the doctor is a common grievance, and it is rooted in a long lineage of illness narratives that engage with the history of the medical gaze. Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1963) outlines the complex relationship between the patient, the medical gaze, and power: the patient becomes powerless and vulnerable under the gaze of medicine, while the doctor accrues power by securing knowledge about the patient’s body, primarily through vision. Vision/touch is one of the many dyads that the artwork in this exhibition engages; indeed, with due regard to the opening gambit of Martin Jay’s book Downcast Eyes (1993), there are no less than eight visual metaphors embedded in the opening lines of this paragraph, demonstrating of just how normalized the modality of vision has become in our daily lives. 

In Comfort Corners, Ellie Krakow’s nine artworks present the reclining body, fragmented and fused with medical equipment such as silicone tubing, the side rails of a hospital bed, or diagnostic monitors. Made of coarsely-textured painted epoxy clay and aquaresin over foam and fiberglass cores, the body-like aspects of Krakow’s sculptures register as familiar/strange and as absurd/plausible. One of the works’ great strengths is that over the course of the perceptual encounter, they open onto a long list of such binaries as functional/decorative, body/environment, outside/inside, illusion/reality, automatic/learned, water/fire, self/other, and, chief among them and as mentioned above, vision/feeling. Through the intersection of these binaries, Krakow engages a conceptual mapping that has long guided how many of us have learned to understand and compartmentalize the world. Even though Krakow’s work initially seems to be “about” the body – and therefore elicits a response through appealing to our shared concerns of embodiment – it also operates with sophistication at the level of discourse, intervening in and calling attention to long-held assumptions about how bodies and minds exist in the world. In this sense, the works are also conceptual (mind/body).

At every turn, then, Krakow’s work binds together binaries, accruing critical power. Her logic of both-and is significant because it mirrors the fluid nature of meaning-making, and because it opens the work up to viewers who come to it with diverse points of entry. Consider a range of dyads such as hungry/full, disabled/able-bodied, young/old, tired/awake. Rarely can we place ourselves at one end of such a spectrum: we are younger than our elders but older than the schoolchildren a few grades below. Krakow’s work argues for the very impossibility of fixed locations, and often prompts a reversal of assumed knowledge. How so? Look at Open Arm (2026), a sculpture of a partial body atop an austere grey armature that is seated upright with its left arm rotated skyward, ready to receive an injection. Its thighs lead up not to a fleshy torso but to a photograph printed on aluminum in the shape of a clinical monitor, the type a doctor might look at during an ultrasound. On the screen we see the folds of hospital drapes with twisting loops of silicone tubing in the foreground, mid-air. Usually the site of the practitioner’s gaze, in Krakow’s hands the technological apparatus delivers the patient’s view from inside the hospital room. The knowledge we gain is not a disclosure of the patient’s body or medical condition, but a glimpse of their experience of embodiment; vision does not depersonalize one body from another, nor does it enhance the examiner’s gaze. Like the photograph of drop ceiling tiles hung at the tilt and height of a waiting room TV in Monitor #1 (2021), Open Arm reverses the direction of the gaze, so that other becomes self. Krakow’s sculpture mirrors reality back to us, transformed.

In this way, Krakow’s apparatus-bodies advocate for more diverse understandings of embodiment and question the mechanics of power. But because they gesture toward the body undergoing treatment, Krakow’s works engage directly with disability, drawing from the artist’s own experience to creatively construct disability from within. In place of the curative imperative of the medical model of disability, Krakow engages the infrastructure and equipment that so many bodies depend on (such as a hospital bed, or a well-fitting prosthetic) and are disabled by (stairs rather than a ramp; an ill-designed prosthetic). In Embedded (2026), a wall-bound sculpture, a reclining torso merges with the side rails of a hospital bed. It is hard not to describe Embedded as sensual – certainly it addresses intimacy – in the long tradition of the reclining nude, and Krakow’s work is smart for consistently keeping ahold of the human dimension of the systems surrounding us, without engaging representation directly. For Krakow infrastructure is a means of abstracting from individual experience and thus identity, while analyzing the systems that structure how we self-define.

Krakow’s capacious view of infrastructure extends beyond the clinical apparatus to encompass hydraulic systems, where the transfer of water offers a parallel framework for thinking the body at once as container and conduit. From the arterial logics of aqueducts and municipal plumbing to the circulatory pathways that sustain the body itself, these systems telescope between macro and micro, binding together what might otherwise appear discrete. As with Krakow’s invocation of medical equipment, such hydraulic networks are not neutral supports but structuring conditions: they regulate flow, pressure, access, and blockage, determining what moves, where, and for whom. In this sense, plumbing operates less as metaphor than as a parallel system overlaid onto the body – one that makes visible the extent to which embodiment is always already infrastructural. This proposition is given sculptural form across the work in Comfort Corners, such as in the node-like channel etched in the flat base that extends behind the hips of Proposition for a Fountain, a Wall, a Mirror (2025–26), rendering the logic of circulation at once architectural and visceral.

Krakow’s work undoes the stability of binaries because its fluid systems refuse fixity; they leak, pool, evaporate, and reroute, confounding what David Getsy calls the doctrine of the binary that otherwise holds categories in place. This, too, is contingent. Throughout our lives, we all move in and out of disability, and Krakow’s work reminds us how fluid the experience of disability actually is. As Sara Ahmed has written in On Being Included, “the sign of inclusion makes the signs of exclusion disappear.” Water becomes a conceptual throughline that links interior and exterior, body and environment, subject and system, not by collapsing differences but by insisting on continuous exchange. By turning to plumbing, Krakow locates the body within a broader field of circulation, where meaning remains in motion, resisting containment and, in doing so, opening onto more elastic ways of understanding how bodies inhabit and are inhabited by the world.

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