Shelby Head
Providence, RI
My interdisciplinary practice investigates the social and linguistic constructs that shape identity, history, and collective memory in the United States.
MessageIn this assemblage, a slender, abstracted figure is bound at the wrists and ankles with tight loops of wire, its elongated limbs held upright in a posture that reads as both surrender and suspension. The figure’s restraint becomes the visual hinge through which the text’s concerns about coercive “conversion therapy” reverberate. As the Supreme Court considers whether a therapist’s free-speech claim can overturn laws protecting minors, the artwork stages its own meditation on control disguised as care. The artwork becomes an indictment of coercive transformation. It asks what happens when institutions—legal, medical, religious—attempt to decide which identities are permissible. And it presents, with stark clarity, the cost borne by the body when autonomy is treated not as a right but as a condition to be corrected.
- Collections: What Remains
© Shelby Head, 2024. All Rights Reserved.
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