Exhibit vernissage | ouch ouch ouch - 2024 Michele Larose-Osler Library Artist in Residence
The team at the McGill Libraries are pleased to invite you, on Thursday, April 17, 2025, at 15 h 30 to the Michele Larose - Osler Library Artist-in-Residence Programme exhibition vernissage by Ev Ricky entitled ouch ouch ouch. Please join us for the panel discussion scheduled right before the vernissage from 14 h 00 to 15 h 30.
L’équipe des Bibliothèques de McGill est heureuse de vous inviter le jeudi 17 avril 2025, à 15 h 30, dans le cadre du Programme d’artiste-en-résidence Michele Larose – Bibliothèque Osler à un vernissage par l’artiste EV Ricky intitulé pain objects à la Bibliothèque Osler de l’histoire de la médecine (3655, promenade William Osler). Veuillez vous joindre à nous pour la table ronde prévue juste avant le vernissage, de 14 h 00 à 15 h 30.
About the exhibit
In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry wrote that "to have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt".
This influential statement, alongside research into early pseudoscientific anatomical iconography, graphic pathography, and discourses in contemporary ecofeminisms, forms the basis of ouch ouch ouch, an exhibition of new work on the somatic, temporal and poetic dimensions of physical pain.
Ouch ouch ouch will debut an artist book of speculative illness morphologies, based on a collection of sensation maps assembled through a daily practice of body scan meditation. Alongside the internal phenomena of pain, a series of gestures representing the duration of the residency (or a single very long, very painful moment) explores the non-linear, dilatory, and atemporal nature of illness.
The accompanying text addresses the act of viewing and draws into question the visible external boundaries of the human form in an extended reflection on the presence of others, objects and non-human animals in early anatomical texts.
About the artist
Once described as “pert” and “young” by Vaginal Creme Davis, Ev Ricky (they/them/theirs, xe/xyr/xyrs) is a multidisciplinary visual and literary artist, cultural worker, agender and TME dyke, and white settler. Agender, immunocompromised, and chronically ill with an invisibilized disability, Ev is interested in using bodily forms and processes in their work to tangle with the poetics of access and the non-consensus reality of being in a sick body as a fundamentally unknowable, inarticulable position. Xyr artistic and curatorial work has been presented at Centaur Theatre, Ada X, Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre, CV2, Entrails Magazine, the FOFA Gallery, the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts, and in the award-winning anthology of transgender comic art “We’re Still Here”. Alongside their current work for the Michèle Larose-Osler Library artist residency, xe is working on a comic art manuscript entitled I Wouldn’t Lie to You. You can follow their work at evricky.com or @ev.r_icky on Instagram.
About the Michele Larose – Osler Library Artist-in-Residence Programme
Thanks to the generosity of Dr. Michele Larose, artist and paediatric neuropsychiatrist who trained in psychiatry and child psychiatry at McGill and in visual arts at Curtin University in Australia, the Osler Library of the History of Medicine has established an artist-in-residence programme.
The award supports visual artists visiting the university to create works that address contemporary and/or historical subjects in medicine and the health sciences that are inspired by the rich and diverse collections held by the Osler Library and/or other sources at McGill, which may include McGill faculties and hospitals. Possible projects can include, but are not limited to: painting; photography; performance; sculpture; and digital, video or installation art.
