Helix Gallery
Contact
1001 Locust Street
Hamilton Building
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Contact
1020 Locust Street
Jefferson Alumni Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Helix Gallery
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer: Iris Crepusculos y Pupilas Madrugadas (Twilight Eyes & Dawn Pupils)
November 15-December 13, 2024
This solo installation features Brooklyn-based Quipucamayoc artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer. Known for her work blending indigenous American, Caribbean and African diasporic doula, griot, quipucamayoc and botanica rituals, Rodriguez Meyer draws on critically endangered embodied wisdom to mend medical wounds across bonded ancestries, geographies, bondaged diasporas, genders and generations.
For her site-specific installation, Rodriguez Meyer has transformed the gallery's institutional white walls into a fabric-cradled, fertile dwelling, integrating reproductive and climate justice healing strategies through documentary sculpture, photography and painting. The installation features two of Rodriguez Meyer’s Mother Mold monuments, pregnancy casts made with workshop participants in the artist’s prior Mama Spa Botanica workshops (2018-present). To create the sculptures, Rodriguez Meyer cast the torsos of pregnant participants using a combination of silicone, plaster and discarded materials including latex gloves, birth control pill and abortion pill packaging, human hair, fingernail clippings, nail salon glitter, serapes, hair or fruit nets, and environmental ephemera such as palm fronds, funerary flowers, and coral collected after tropical storms. Conceived as fertility effigies, the resulting sculptures honor frontline survivors of the dual reproductive health and climate crisis in the U.S.
About the Artist
Born in a car in an Everglades swamp, raised Tinkuy and Ital between Homestead, Florida, and the Caribbean, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a mixed-race indigenous Andean American (Muisca/Inca), Brooklyn and Miami-based Quipucamayoc artist, archive digger, architect and advocate. Spanning 20 years and 30 countries, Coralina has collaborated with reproductive justice and climate leaders while working in installation, photography, sculpture, architecture and academia. Coralina founded Abra Studio in 2005, is a professor at Pratt, a visiting lecturer at University of Maryland and resident of Ankhlave Arts Alliance NYC. They studied painting at MICA and anthropology at Hopkins and hold a BFA in Architecture from Parsons and MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College.
About Helix Gallery
The Helix Gallery is a 300-square-foot storefront exhibition space showcasing creative projects that explore connections between the arts, humanities, medicine and health, as well as an annual Jefferson student art exhibition.
Location
1001 Locust Street, Philadelphia, 19107
(inside the Dorrance H. Hamilton Building)
Hours
November 15-December 13, 2024 (closed November 27 & 29)
Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays - 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Contact: Megan Voeller, Director of Humanities
Upcoming Projects
Dominic Quagliozzi: Corporis Fabrica
February-April 2025
In this solo exhibition by Dominic Quagliozzi, the artist presents recent work that is informed by his lived experience with Cystic Fibrosis and as a recipient of a double lung transplant in 2015. Since that time, he has loosely documented the changes in his body through paintings, sculptures, works on paper and video. His art also functions as talismans through which to channel change that is self-empowering, and indeed, more able to be controlled, flipping the inevitable estrangement he experienced within the medical industrial complex as a patient of a serious and life-threatening surgery. This exhibition takes on this journey through work completed between 2019-2024. Included in the exhibition are three reconstituted hospital gowns made from various materials (using hospital gown material as a starting point): Suit (2019), Parachute (2022) and Teddy Bear Clinic (2024), a pink therapeutic thoracic pillow fashioned into a lung swaddled by a diced teddy bear, entitled Co-parenting (2024), Help Me Up (2020), a looping video installation of limbs against sky, which are simultaneously falling and reaching, and Anatomy Drawings 1 & 2 (2024), a mimicry of the hands and arms in the companion video. The drawings have been beautifully crafted from betadine, an antiseptic that provides infection protection commonly used before surgery, along with colored pencils, acrylic gel, and thread on cut paper which has been sewed together by a zig-zag pattern, alluding to surgical stitching. The title of the exhibition is taken from one of the first modern anatomy books by Andreas Vesalius entitled De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Of the Structure of the Human Body) (1555). The themes of the Vesalius text have inspired Quagliozzi’s work, through the history of studying the human body, and current trends within the medical humanities to extend those histories from a strictly medical world into a dialogue on the social, cultural and political circumstances surrounding health and wellness. By emphasizing the human in medical humanities, Quagliozzi’s objects and their accompanying narratives contribute to this evolving critical field in ways that are playful, introspective and reflective of the fragility and vulnerability of chronic illness.
Dominic Quagliozzi (artist) is a multidisciplinary artist and arts educator. His work reconciles his lived experience with chronic illness and disability to explore personal histories and the domestication of illness. He received an MFA in Studio Arts from Cal State University, Los Angeles and a BA in Sociology from Providence College. His work is in the permanent collection at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum and in the Rhizome.org digital archive. In 2018, he was on the Keynote patient panel at the Nexus Summit for Interprofessional Care and Education at the University of Minnesota. He was a recipient of the MassMOCA Assests4Artists statewide capacity grant in 2024. He is on the Arts Council for Creative Healing for Youth in Pain. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Calgary Contemporary in Canada and Casula Powerhouse Art Centre in New South Wales, Australia. He has given workshops and lectures at the Rhode Island School of Design, Worcester Art Museum, UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, USC Keck School of Medicine, Chapman University and Cal State Long Beach.
Amanda Cachia (curator) has an established career profile as a curator, consultant, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality. She is the tenure-track Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of the Arts Leadership Graduate Program at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston. She is a 2023 grantee of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her second monograph, Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism, which is forthcoming with Manchester University Press in September 2025. Her first book, The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique, will be released in December 2024 by Temple University Press. Cachia is also the editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022) published by Routledge, which includes over 40 international contributors. Her writing has been translated into Spanish, German, and Italian. She has a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego. Cachia has curated approximately 50 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the USA, England, Australia and Canada.
Past Projects
Canines as Healers: Stories & Portraits of Veterans & Service Dogs
July 22 – September 13
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Open House and Reception, Saturday, August 3, 12-2 p.m.
Service dogs can provide a lifeline back to the world for veterans experiencing PTSD, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and other mental health struggles. Developed from a Scholarly Inquiry Humanities project at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, medical student Carly Onofrio-Kane interviewed and took photo portraits of nine veterans with their service dogs in analog and digital film, discussing their relationship in the context of healing. The narratives express the life-saving impact of service dogs on veterans’ lives, demonstrating an opportunity to explore their companionship as a supplement to traditional medical care. Given the high rates of PTSD and suicide in veterans, the project encourages a sense of urgency in increasing access to service dogs for veterans.
Carly Onofrio-Kane is a third-year medical student at SKMC. As a former hairstylist, she loved hearing the stories of her clients, and is grateful to hear new stories in the patients she meets at Jefferson. She graduated from Temple University with a BA in Psychology in 2020. She started practicing amateur photography in her early teens and enjoys experimenting with various analog films. She is a recipient of the VA Health Professional Scholarship Program and will continue in her story collection and advocacy for service dogs and veteran healthcare.
Phoebe Warren (Curator) is a third-year medical student at SKMC. Before beginning her medical education, Phoebe received a BA in Art History from Princeton University in 2021. Her Senior Thesis research addressed the ways in which images shape our understanding of disease pandemics. She served as an Education Fellow for the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 2022.
Creativity in Motion
May 1-July 1, 2024
The annual Jefferson student art exhibition celebrates the unique talents of Jefferson students across health professions. This year’s showcase at Helix Gallery highlights visual artist contributors to Inside Out, Jefferson’s student-led literary and art journal, as well as the three commissioned student artists for the 2023-2024 Jefferson Humanities Forum theme, "Futures."
Featuring: Connor Crutchfield, Sanskruti Dave, Amanda Rose Farese, Benjamin Fleet, Meryem Guler, Faith Higgins, Sarah Muche-Smith, Abhijeet Sambangi, Elizabeth Upton and Madison Woods.
The Crisis Isn't Over
October 9, 2023 - January 5, 2024
Pulling from the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Rami George presents “The Crisis Isn’t Over,” a new exhibition for Jefferson’s Helix Gallery. With a focus on materials related to the ongoing AIDS crisis, George revisits legacies of activism from ACT UP and local figures lost early to AIDS. “The Crisis Isn’t Over” continues George’s explorations into local Philadelphia queer history, and is their first presentation as the Archives inaugural Artist in Residence.
Rami George (born 1989, U.S.) is a multidisciplinary artist currently based on Lenape land in what is now called Philadelphia. Their work—spanning photo, video, installation, text, and music/sound—has been presented in exhibitions and screenings at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Philadelphia; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Anthology Film Archives, New York City; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Scotland; Grand Union, Birmingham, England; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; LUX, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and elsewhere. They continue to be influenced and motivated by political struggles and fractured narratives.
Image from "Au Courant" Photographs Collection in the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center, selected and scanned by Rami George.
File/Life: We Remember Stories of Pennhurst
January 17 - April 13, 2024
Jefferson Humanities & Health and The Institute on Disabilities, Temple University, College of Education and Human Development, present File/Life: We Remember Stories of Pennhurst at Helix Gallery.
Over nearly eight decades, more than 10,000 people lived at the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, an institution for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities operated by the state of Pennsylvania from 1908 to 1987. When it opened, Pennhurst was considered a model facility. When it closed, it was because Pennhurst violated the human rights of the people living there.
File/Life is a community-led creative exploration of the Pennhurst archives by seven archivists, all people with disabilities and/or family members, including two former Pennhurst residents. These community archivists collaborated with a team of multi-disciplinary artists to share stories that made them listen, feel, imagine, and remember. In doing so, they asked the question: Can a file ever contain a life?
Visitors are invited to read and interact with archival material, listen to audio and watch video. Content is ASL interpreted, audio described, captioned, and available in Braille and though QR codes. Some video content is accessed through headphones.