Mary Gring
Disintegration/The Cure
Interdisciplinary Arts & Media
Project Statement
Disintegration/The Cure is an immersive, multimedia installation that encourages healing and acceptance through creative self-care. Inspired by problematic, high-stakes performance art and my personal experience with mental illness and physical disability, Disintegration/The Cure subverts my compulsive behaviors through fixed, methodical artmaking processes. In this project, I film myself taking a shower—a mundane action performed obsessively—by encasing an endoscopic camera within a bar of soap. Separately, materials such as dye, mica, and glitter are used to make two thousand bars of soap.
Together, the bars of soap and video performance are brought together through projection and a scented sculpture—The bars of soap rest on the floor of the gallery space as a sculpture of brilliant, fragranced art objects, while the video performance is projected on two adjoining walls, further filling the space. The audio that accompanies the video is a manipulated version of “Plainsong” by The Cure, the opening track on their 1989 album Disintegration, from which the project gets its name. The immersive installation invites viewers to confront the intimate, honest realities of illness, coping and physicality in a way that could seemingly swallow them whole.
Disintegration/The Cure was originally scheduled to debut in May 2020 as part of Columbia College Chicago's Art & Art History MFA Thesis Exhibition until COVID-19 forced gallery closures. The project, partially funded by The Albert P. Weisman Award, will be exhibited in full at a later date.
Artist Biography
Mary Gring is a Chicago-based artist who combines performance, video, projection and sculpture to create immersive multimedia installations that investigate the radical, transformative nature of caring for one’s self and one another. Originally from South Bend, Indiana, Mary studied Fine Art and Sociology at Saint Mary’s College before earning her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Media from Columbia College Chicago. Mary is a recipient of the 2020 Albert P. Weisman Award and has exhibited her work throughout the Midwest.