Ellie Krakow’s project, Comfort Corners, at FOYER-LA includes new and recent sculptures, photographs and drawings that grapple with her experience of chronic illness.
“I aim to render the often-invisible realities of illness and claim a place for the sick body within the lineage of figurative sculpture. Drawing from the fleshy plastics and softened edges of hospital design – and from the reclining nude in art history – my figures morph into use-objects that fail at their presumed functions: bodies become carts with wheels that will not turn and information screens displaying only close-up textures of medical spaces. These failures, edged with humor, are balanced by gestures of care, such as an arm extended to lend support. Like myself after decades of treatment and surveillance, these works inhabit a tender, uncanny space between flesh and technology, between what can be measured and what can be felt. Too often, bodies marked by illness are rendered either invisible or sensationalized. With Comfort Corners I resist both extremes, instead proposing vulnerability as a shared human condition, where fragility and resilience coexist, and where the sick body is central rather than marginal.”