Sarah Eckstine’s new photography exhibit “From the Inside” opens at the Rachel Cooper Gallery on September 5, and runs through December 11, 2023. Eckstine’s exhibit is the first of two exhibits this year to be hosted by the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. There will be an opening reception and artist talk at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, September 13, in Rachel Cooper Hall room 237.
Eckstine’s work is brave and deeply autobiographical. She works with artistic practices such as digital and analog photography, alternative processes, and writing to create self-portraits and work about the subjects surrounding chronic illness, sex: both in its pain and pleasure, and her process of healing physically and mentally.
“From the Inside” features portraits, photographs, medical imagery, and text-based images focusing on her long-standing struggle with chronic illness and chronic pain. Her images engage and reflect her life and embodied interaction with “chronic illness, sex, trauma, and healing”—a journey complicated by years of medical misdiagnoses and health care providers’ failure to believe her embodied testimonies. According to Eckstine, the exhibit “explores how I use my body as a subject to become reacquainted with myself as a woman after feeling alienated from my body due to the medicalization of my sexual organs.”
“This exhibition provides an archive of my health and my healing and functions as a means of catharsis, but even more, opens space for the discussion of the taboo topics of female sexual health, both painful and pleasurable,” Eckstine said. Her work helps to open the door for more discussion about female sexual dysfunctions.
Eckstine is an MFA student in the Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts and a graduate student in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Illinois State University. The exhibit and reception are free and open to the public. Eckstine’s exhibit runs through December 11.
