Time Out Chicago - Rosemary Feit Covey Review
Time Out Chicago / Issue 148 : Dec 27, 2007–Jan 2, 2008
Rosemary Feit Covey
"Internal Medicine," International Museum of Surgical Science, through Jan 18.
Rosemary Feit Covey, Nkonde, 1996.Rosemary Feit Covey’s powerful wood engravings have the morbid allure of a goth beauty. The 17 pieces in this show belong to three series Covey worked on from 1996 to 2006, each of which addresses illness from a different perspective.
"Porcupine Girl" was inspired by Covey’s own surgery for a life-threatening ailment. Its intricate prints depict a nude woman with a thicket of quills emerging from her back and a torso that was ripped open and loosely stitched back together. The most haunting of them is Porcupine Girl (quills off), in which the woman has been stripped of her unusual armor: Huddling on a pile of the discarded quills with her back to the viewer, her spine disturbingly visible, she curls in on herself with a terrified expression.
The black-and white prints in "Vanitas, Vanitas," which seem like 17th-century Dutch still lifes reinterpreted by Neil Gaiman, refer to the resurgence of dreaded diseases. The plague suffuses Ring Around the Rosie, in which a little girl calmly kneels amid a herd of rats while a figure in a bird mask and a dark cloak with a biohazard symbol stands over her. The nail-studded skeleton in Nkonde represents a Congolese fetish with power over sickness and death; despite her youth, his lovely dance partner cannot escape his embrace.
Covey’s "Brain Tumor" series was commissioned by David Craig Welch to document his experiences during treatment for cancer. Welch’s intensity shows through Covey’s portraits of his ailing body and the assemblages containing fragments of his journals, but the viewer is kept at a distance, unable to puzzle out their meaning. Despite its idiosyncrasies, most of Covey’s work transforms fear into a transcendent shared experience.
—Lauren Weinberg
Source: Time Out Chicago
