Stan Strembicki | Body, Soul and Science
Untitled #115, 2006
Statement
I discovered the site of the abandoned St. Louis Charity Hospital in 2000 and began photographing the interiors of the facility. One could not but be affected by the sense of the past there. This was a place where only those most desperate for medical care, came for help. Even empty, it echoed of those who worked there, who suffered in its wards and sought help from its staff. My early works lacked in the complexity of emotion I felt for this place and I turned to collage and multiple exposure to layer those feeling I had experienced. Late in 2002, I found a file cabinet lying on its side in the top floor of one of the out buildings, it contained medical records from 1932-1947 from the radiological ward of the hospital. In these records were not only treatment records, but also photographs of patients. This last indignity, discarded patient records, seemed so emblematic of the whole history of City Hospital.
I used these records, in whole, and part, mixing files of many patients, and combining them with nude figures I had photographed in the studio to create images that evoke some of the complex feelings I had working there. Many of these images contain as many as 7 layers of text and images.
My work is intended to not only speak to the experience of this specific place, but to also address issues of medical care and the fragility of the human body. In 1932, surgically inserting pellets of radioactive material into tumors was considered state of the art medical treatment, radiation therapy for a range of illness was seen as a practical use of modern technology. Lost in this is the individual, and in the case of City Hospital, you cannot help but reflect on a class of people who were desperate for medical care. I want this work to also address this issue by recognizing that state of the art medical care needs to be seen in a spectrum of time, we no longer use leaches to remove evil humors, and perhaps in a more contemporary sense, many of our current practices will be seen as crude as those applied to patients in 1932.
Since then, I have re-named the work Body, Soul and Science to more accurately describe what the current work addresses. The portfolio goes beyond my early impressions of St. Louis City Hospital and now speaks more to the balance of modern medical science and the very nature of the human experience. More recent work includes medical text, CAT scans and images from MRI machine as well as medical illustrations from the 1850’s.