Show me where it hurts
Solo Exhibition, Galerie Buhler Gallery, St. Boniface Hospital, Winnipeg, 2026
Show me where it hurts
Galerie Buhler Gallery
9 April - 10 July, 2026
The installation brings together finger puppets, a larger-than-life children's fold out puppet theater, armatures that support the puppets, and a large wearable sculpture based on my own hand, alongside photos and videos of the puppets being animated, and finally this book of poetic scores for puppets plays. The work focuses on the relationship between puppetry and spaces of pediatric illness; puppets are used as tools of distraction during clinical procedures, employed to demonstrate procedures, and animated by children themselves to practice procedures or familiarize themselves with medical processes.
In the installation, the finger puppets are modeled after items within a traditional still life painting: a flower, fruit, a bug, a butterfly, and a caterpillar. Some have petals wilting or leaves with holes bitten through, forever stuck in a representation of perpetual fading. Together they form a memento mori, a vanitas, an absurd kid-like reminder of the beauty, brightness, grief, joy, and comedy of life and death.
The work teeters between playfulness, comedy, theatricality, and explorations of death and grief. The project prompts viewers to consider the agency of medicalized bodies, thinking through the complicated power dynamics between health care worker and patient, mind and body, patient and puppet, puppet and puppeteer, art and viewer, viewer and artist. Puppets remind us of play and childhood, yet they also evoke relationships of power and performance.
Find an accompanying essay for the exhibition, written by hannah_g, curator of Galerie Buhler Gallery.
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