Virtual Panel Discussion: Anna Cowley Ford, Anna Hite, Kym McDaniel

December 2nd, 2023 at 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

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Join us for a free virtual panel discussion with artists Anna Cowley Ford, Anna Hite, Kym McDaniel moderated by Curator Zoe Cinel. 

About the exhibition: 

Chronicles of the Chronic is a group exhibition that celebrates the creativity and resilience of the chronically ill community by featuring regional, national and international artists whose artistic practice reflects holistically upon the experience of living with a chronic health condition.

Learn more at: https://www.rochesterartcenter.org/exhibition/chronicles-of-the-chronic

About the panelists: 

Anna Cowley Ford (Portland, ME) uses a variety of media including soft sculpture, video, medical object, and ceramics, to communicate her personal experience with Chronic Migraines and pain, and to address larger issues of disability, mental health and chronic invisible illness. Her soft sculpture Fatigue is featured in Chronicles of the Chronic. The artist's material choices manifest the non-visible sensations associated with Cowley Ford's health conditions. For the artist, revealing these hidden ailments fosters empathy and furthers understanding of how health conditions are disabling on a chronic scale.

Anna Hite is an artist and educator in Mississippi. As a multimedia artist Hite's preferred media are printmaking, photography, digital art, and book arts. Though she was diagnosed with lupus at age 14, chronic illness and disability did not feature strongly in her work until the COVID-19 pandemic. Struck by the discussions around disability and disposability brought on by the pandemic, she was inspired to start exploring both personal and societal perceptions of disability in her work. Hite's installation Recovery Position is currently featured in Chronicles of the Chronic. Her other conceptual focuses include gender, memory, and place as well as interrogations of digital news culture. 

Kym McDaniel (Salt Lake City, UT) is an experimental filmmaker, choreographer and performer, who uses movement and gesture to explore the vulnerability of living in a sick and disabled body. She shifted from traditional dance performance to filmmaking after a head injury in her early 20s. Chronicles of the Chronic features McDaniels' video series Exit Strategies. After developing debilitating chronic pain from a dance injury, Exit Strategies were created as a healing experiment. Over the course of six films, the filmmaker questions the intersection between her stored body memories and physical illnesses. The works screen as both a linear sequence and nonlinear experimental vignettes, representative of the process spiral of trauma and recovery. By using images and voice as a reclamation of history and personal video diary, the filmmaker queers and rebuilds herself and her world in the aftermath of trauma.