Health Club

These artists observe the interdependence of human wellness on constructed notions of place by focusing on sites of civic and leisure activities. This contemplation does not focus on obvious venues such as gyms or spas, but locations including museums, hospitals, airports, and other public places, by which the artists can examine how society’s built environments can foster—or deteriorate—health, both mental and physical.

Hospitals and parks facilitate health in the most direct manner on the body, however artists Nelly Agassi and Andrew Schachman of Fieldwork create work that complicates common assumptions of these places of recovery and suggests greater potential as a site for community and imagination. Museums and cultural centers addressed in the work of Yane Calovski & Hristina Ivanoska, Faheem Majeed, and Bridget O’Gorman point out the aspirations and paradoxes in these mission driven places to promote public learning and engagement with their collections, while also mandating strict care and distance of the public from their historical objects as proxy of the body. Finally, artists Balas & Wax, Kevin J. Miyazaki, and Charo Garaigorta independently consider the leisure spaces of travel and accommodations and highlight the tension between being protected and being controlled through architecture.