RIEL STURCHIO

Unremarkable consists of traditionally made film photographs, digital scans, unique unstable gelatin silver lumen prints, and erasure poems. This selection of erasure work derives from over 100 patient care documents written by various physicians from facilities throughout Maine, New York, and Texas between 2014-2023.

I use the objective and often sterile language of patient care reports with viscerally detailed images to draw connections between imagined narratives and physical evidence of touch. Through visuals, I show varieties of touch including fingerprints, gelatin silver paper touched by the sun, staged still lifes demonstrating intervened representations of the body, and medical pamphlets provided by physicians. I utilize language to reclaim my narrative of the overwhelming experience of chronic pain and illness from my perspective as a chronically ill, queer, white afab person. I am interested in the representation of the patient as an archetype of a nuanced experience of pain and how the medical-industrial complex continues to discredit the voices of women. I conceptually present images as figures on a bed of blue, the color of sterile medical wrap often used in surgery.

Through erasure, I regain agency lost through reductive categorizations of my symptoms stemming from “typical women’s pain.” I transform my patient care reports into narratives that relay doubt, hope, and skepticism.

I seek to offer my audience a redacted relationship where the physician’s voice conceals my questions in a cacophony of medical jargon, blame, and unfulfilled promise. 

Because the language of touch is missing from patient care reports, I present visual evidence of the ways in which my body is touched, prodded, and manipulated through seeking care. The erasure poems serve to provide a winding narrative full of repetitive nonchalance, words such as “normal” and “unremarkable” despite the overwhelming evidence of the contrary. I use erasure within the word unremarkable--a medical term describing something as not particularly interesting, or worthy of note.