DISGUST: Unhealthy Practices

"DISGUST: unhealthy practices", 96 pages, 6”x 9”, full color.

Curated by Todd Edward Herman, filmmaker, photographer and founding director of east window. This catalog is the culmination of an open call and group exhibit of writings and images on the theme of disgust by nearly one hundred writers and visual artists from around the world. DISGUST: unhealthy practices opened April 7 -June 28, 2022 at East Window SOUTH Gallery in Boulder, Colorado.

DISGUST is often seen as the bridge between our moral imperatives and the wilds of survival; the cusp of emotion and instinct. Activated in response to what we perceive or imagine as revolting, sick, infectious, diseased, contaminated and thereby threatening, disgust signals our awareness of fissures between feelings of safety and peril, stability and insecurity; of disjunctions that threaten facets of our personal identity and society at large.

Our collective actions relative to our experiences of disgust often bear witness to damaging prejudices and rhetorics, which attempt to conflate those who we perceive as different from ourselves, socially, culturally, politically, sexually, religiously, in age or ability, with vectors of physical or moral contamination. To be clear, this project aims to confront, subvert and transform these prejudices, not reinforce them.

The images and texts which comprise this international group exhibit freely explore issues of bodily function, ownership, control, choice or lack thereof. We see works grappling with violated physical and social borders and hierarchies; the violation of gender boundaries and fluidity; notions of contagion, purity, wellness, disease and how such constructs may be used to ostracize unwanted members of various social groups. What do these representations of our bodies, belongings and psyches, seen through the lens of disgust, really mean to us, that we should impose such powerful and dangerous abstractions upon them? What roles can disgust play in re-shaping other less negative social interactions and in constructing social values that are in turn supportive of those interactions?

The often volatile emotions expressed through the works in this project make it easy to assume that the only story they tell is one of adversarial engagement and oppression. However, is it possible that through these many evocations of violated personal and collective borders, a peculiar sense of solidarity is being revealed? For when an out-group, seen from any side, becomes so close as to be indiscernible from ourselves isn't that when it becomes most threatening?

-- Todd Edward Herman 2022