Home-grown cutie and artist extraordinaire Chase Joynt recently opened his current project in the Windy City. Resisterectomy explores narratives of surgery, mapping his own experiences of mastectomy and hysterectomy in relation to another’s cancer surgeries.
Joynt explains to The Chicago Maroon, “In retrospect, I think I was seeking what I thought to be my ‘antithesis’ — a cisgendered, relatively normative suburban woman, possibly who had experiences with breast and/or uterine cancer.” The result ended up being a collaboration with Dr Mary Bryson, a University of British Columbia professor and the director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. Bryson’s a widely published academic whose work has previously explored her own cancer treatment in the context of cancer experiences of queer Canadians.
Joynt’s work, previously presented at the Feminist Art Gallery in Toronto and the Access Gallery in Vancouver, explores the altering and sometimes violent and traumatic experience of surgery, but, he says, “We actively acknowledge and simultaneously subvert various stories about bodies, gender, trauma and cancer, and in doing so understand the risk in our ‘play.’”
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