Art in My Veins: A Medical Self portrait.
Venue: JAMA

Atypical self portrait documents the artist's appearance. It may be self serving, showing the subject's more laudable attributes, or it may be more revealing of the sitter's inner life. Artist Philip Carey has created a different kind of self portrait, using disease as a catalyst to portray a universal feeling about the burden of being sick. His medical self portrait, Art in My Veins, is a record of processes imposed on his body, a catalog of evidence that reflects excessive interventions required to heal. Born in 1942 in Long Beach, California, Carey had always been a collector, picking up bits and pieces from his environment and saving them for potential projects. "I've always looked at my environment situations from an artistic viewpoint interested in the ephemera of our civilization stuff that's used then thrown out refuse its artistic possibilities," he explained in written correspondence. When in 2004 a broken arm brought him into a hospital environment, he found a whole new world of materials that could be mined for art. Beginning with his cast and steel pins, he started a new collection of medically related scraps. Unfortunately, the collection grew quickly, as he was diagnosed with heart disease the same year, kidney disease in 2008, and prostate cancer in 2011. Renal failure, with its endless hours of hemodialysis, produced seemingly endless administrative and medical detritus, including medicine bottles, syringes, hospital gloves, dietary literature, prescriptions, billing notices, and dialysis machine hardware. Carey eventually accumulated a medical collection culled from an estimated 15 hospital operations, 12 outpatient procedures, 37 radiation treatments, and about 3000 hours of dialysis. By 2015 he felt he had enough material to produce a sculpture, and the result was his life sized vignette, Art in My Veins. In Art in My Veins Carey places himself in the center of a small stage, posed as a silent carnival barker with a marquee displaying the piece's title hung above him. His face is contorted into a painful grimace as he pulls apart his chest cavity to reveal major organs sculpted from chicken wire, clay, plaster, and paint. The organs are hooked up to real catheters and a dialysis machine. The remainder of his body and stage are plastered with his collected medical materials, densely accompanied by colored drawings on envelopes of scenes or objects Carey viewed while confined to his chair, photographs of procedural scars and bruises, echocardiograms and x ray films, and photographs of the artist undergoing tests and procedures. The whole scene creates a baroque chaos around the central figure. Its composition telescopes years of chronic illness interventions into a single frame of space and time and keeps the eye in motion while it simultaneously compels it to pause and examine the more discreet minutiae that make up the larger effect. In this way the viewer's experience of the work could be said to reflect the health and care of people like Carey, whose office or clinic visits often require physicians and patients to shift focus within extensive problem, test result, and medication lists while also keeping a larger picture of the patient in mind. By painstakingly arranging the physical elements of his health care experience, Carey emulates the burdens of chronic disease with its constant calculations of new medicines and treatments, the stressful accumulation of medical bills, and the vigilance needed to keep track of it all. Carey reports that few health care workers took notice of his work while it was in process. During his 6 years of dialysis treatments, he completed about 450 drawings on No. 10 envelopes, but physicians and nurses rarely commented on them. He muses, " perhaps it was a HIPAA/personal space situation." One exception was a tattooed physician who jokingly asked Carey to design a tattoo for him. Carey received a more active response to the work from other hemodialysis patients when a print of Art in My Veins was displayed in the lobby of DaVita San Luis Obispo dialysis center where he had received his treatments. They felt the work aptly demonstrated the complexity of living with renal replacement therapy and the toll on lifestyle that dialysis has for both patients and their families. Rebecca Hoffberger, founder and director of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, knew Carey as an artist and museum visitor. He would periodically send her his elaborately drawn envelopes, so she was familiar with his concentration on medical themes. Focusing on how the sculpture could inspire a hope for healing in its viewers and thinking the work could particularly bring awareness to the acute need for willing organ donors, she included Art in My Veins in the museum's exhibition, The Big Hope Show (October 3, 2015 September 4, 2016) an exhibition curated to "champion the Ph ot o cr ed it: Ch ar lo tt e D iN un zi o.