// It Makes Me Sick [ view slides ]

Bronx Council on the Arts' Longwood Arts Project would like to thank Holland Cotter for his review of our current exhibits in Friday October 26, 2001's New York Times (p. E35): "It Makes Me Sick".

In mid-September the Longwood Arts Project opened a funky, funny show on what has since become a not-funny subject: disease. In this case, though, the maladies are invented. Clint Takeda has molded a lumpy plaster head to demonstrate the pathological effects of souped-up car stereos; Marc Grubstein's clinical photograph of problem skin is actually a shot of a slice of pizza. Rama Hoffpauir designs protective clothing for those suffering from intimacy problems, while Micol Hebron forges a graphic link between fashion and digestive disorders.

As for psychological disturbance, Meghan LeBorious examines the 19th-century history of hysteria, Rachel Abrams creates a soothing room to treat it in, and William Wegman gives personal testimony in his 1970 video, "Rage and Depression." As for cures? Paul Swinbeck comes through with a pair of adjoining medicine cabinets: one holds a few vials of pills, the other is filled with black magic paraphernalia. (The artist is a native of Salem, Mass.) The curator, Robert Blackson, presents all of this with a dead-pan humor, which these days has a certain whistling-in-the dark edge.