Single Use Only

Sarah Sudhoff

Exhibition: Nov 15, 2012 – Jan 13, 2013


In Single Use Only, Sudhoff presents enlarged, detailed views of the autoclaved medical waste flanking a single bench cast from recycled waste and cement. Large-scale color photographs accentuate the wealth of surface textures and colors she pursued. Highlighting the saturated purple bulging mass of a cooked latex glove, the folded and bubbling pink plastics, or the vein-like wrinkles on a biohazard bag that had melted into itself, her works transform autoclaved waste into full-bodied, graceful abstractions. Her brilliant, predominately red and pink compositions reference the very organs, skin, cellular structures, arteries, and heart valves that have been potentially touched, cured, or protected by the medical products before they were melted. Two of the photographs depict compacted blocks of medical waste, documenting the moment prior to either the waste’s shredding and recycling or transfer to a landfill.

Once sterilized in autoclave, the syringes, lancets, IV bags, test tubes, gauze, and gloves-items often imprinted with the text labeled as “Single Use Only”-are all able to be recycled. This sterilized medical waste can be burned as energy to power homes and hospitals, and the ash from burning can be collected and used as an additive for cement and other construction material. For Single Use Only, Sudhoff incinerated a sampling of shredded, autoclaved medical waste and mixed the resulting ashes to create the cement in the installation’s bench. Sitting on the piece of furniture becomes an act of empathy; it is an intimate connection to the stuff that touched illness, crime, or death-and is an atypical experience in an American culture that tends to deny death and decay. The exhibition serves as a visual and material parallel to the act of organ transplants or the act of recycling parts of the body-a delineation of the new energy that comes from sickness or death.

ABOUT THE PROCESS

Single Use Only is a new chapter in Sudhoff’s examination of the body and mortality in medical contexts through an extended investigation of the life of hospital waste. To ensure tools and other hazardous materials such as IV bags, latex gloves, syringes, or biohazard bags are sterilized before transfer to a landfill or recycling plant, they must be processed by facilities called autoclaves. Autoclaves measure the precise temperature and pressure necessary to appropriately treat the waste through a process of pressurized steam cooking. She obtained access to a Texas facility, where she photographed containers of waste right after sterilization. Using a medium-format film camera, she recorded waste in large steel dumpsters that had reached temperatures up to 262 degrees Farenheit during 90 minutes of sterilization. She used available light in the autoclave and a long exposure time of four to eight seconds per shot, with exactly three minutes at each dumpster to circulate and record sections of hot waste before it had to be transferred to a compacter so the container could be used for the next batch.

Access to this autoclave, like many of Sudhoff’s projects, required special permission and specific levels of access that required months to obtain, given that the material is hazardous before sterilization and that it might contain confidential patient information. She shares that her “requests for access to medical environments are rejected 90 percent of the time, yet this rejection just fuels the fire to keep pursuing a specific topic and redefines my purpose and focus. I know most people would give up after the second or third rejection, but knowing this keeps me motivated.”

Artist

Sarah Sudhoff

San Antonio, Texas, USA

San Antonio photographer Sarah Sudhoff documents and deconstructs topics of femininity, mortality, and humanity. Sudhoff’s Repository series fixes an unwavering gaze on personal experiences with illness and trauma to the body through self-portraits in morgues and examination rooms, photographs of waste in hospital trashcans, and still-life shots of extracted tissue and organ samples waiting disposal. Her At the Hour of Our Death large-scale color photographs feature swatches of bedding, carpet, and upholstery stained in the final moment of an individual’s life. Each image is titled with the year and cause of death, as well as the deceased’s sex and age, documentation that strikes the viewer as a chilling reminder of his or her own impending mortality. Whether training her lens on pathological waste, hospitals, artifacts soiled during the passing of human life, or surgical experiences, Sudhoff presents an honest, direct, and human representation of her own reckoning with mortality.
A photographer and art educator, Sudhoff holds an MFA in photography from Parsons The New School for Design as well as a Bachelor’s in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. She has had solo exhibitions including Repository at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio (2012); At the Hour of Our Death at DeSantos Gallery in Houston (2010); 2217 at Cactus Bra Space in San Antonio (2010); and Rx at IPS Gallerie in Montreal (2009). Her work has also been included in many national and international group exhibitions such as What Cannot be Cured Must be Endured at Rutgers University (2012); Then and Now: The Art of Development at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (2011); and the PhotoIreland Festival in Dublin (2011). She was a speaker in the 2012 “Artists Looking at Art” lecture series at the McNay Art Museum, and was featured in NPR’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge” story “Death and Dying,” which aired May 20, 2012. Publications of her work include the upcoming Blood Trunk Books (2013) and Veine Magazine, War Issue (2012). Sudhoff is also the co-founder of the Austin Center for Photography.

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Curator

Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson

Aspen, Colorado, USA

Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson is the Director and Chief Curator at the Aspen Art Museum. From 1999-2005 she was the Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, where she curated more than forty solo exhibitions of international contemporary artists such as Peter Doig, Tobias Rehberger, Shirin Neshat, Teresita Fernández, Julie Mehretu, Doug Aitken, Tacita Dean, Wolfgang Laib, Ernesto Neto, Simryn Gill, Sanford Biggers, and T.J. Wilcox. Formerly she was the Assistant Curator of 20th-century Art at The Jewish Museum, New York, appointed in 1993, and curated Light x Eight: The Hanukkah Project, Contemporary Artist Project: Kristin Oppenheim, and Louis I. Kahn Drawings: Synagogue Projects which traveled to The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
Zuckerman Jacobson has lectured extensively on contemporary art, independently curated exhibitions internationally, and served in numerous advisory capacities at The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, The MacArthur Foundation, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Creative Capital, and The Art Council, among others.
She received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and MA in Art History from CUNY Hunter College. A graduate of Christie’s Education and recipient of a diploma from the Royal Society of Art, London, Zuckerman Jacobson has taught at UC Berkeley, CUNY Hunter College, and is on the faculty of CCA as a professor in the Masters of Curatorial Studies program.
Photo by Jim Paussa

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