Jill Casid | Indisposable: Tactics for Care and Mourning

Jill H. Casid, Spirochetes of Contact, 2019, SX-70 Polaroids, wooden support structure conceived in collaboration with and fabricated by Sylvie Rosenthal, 30 x 192 x 12 inches.

Jill H. Casid, Untitled (Throw Out), 2017 – 2022, Video (16:30), paper envelope, projector, Conceived, written, and performed by Jill Casid and realized by Jack Kellogg.

Click the button below for the audio and text of the VISUAL DESCRIPTION for Jill H. Casid’s Spirochetes of Contact and Untitled (Throw Out):


Spanning the back part of the gallery, Spirochetes of Contact takes its name and animating figure for the biopolitics of public sex from the spirochete form (Greek for spiraling hair) of the bacterial agent of Lyme disease Borrelia burgdorferi spread by infected blacklegged ticks (known as deer ticks). Here it takes the materialized form of 28 original SX-70 Polaroid prints with their delicate surface emulsions and distinctive white borders uncovered and unprotected. These fragile originals are laid bare and exposed across the surface of a 16-foot-long lightweight, precarious and yet flexible wooden support structure that was conceived in collaboration with and fabricated by sculptor Sylvie Rosenthal to echo the sun-bleached and sea-salt rubbed wood of the boardwalk infrastructure of Fire Island, once the epicenter of the AIDS crisis (that is not over) and now ground-zero for Lyme Disease.
Jill H. Casid, “Spirochetes of Contact”, 2019, SX-70 Polaroids, wooden support structure, conceived in collaboration with and fabricated by Sylvie Rosenthal. 30 x 192 x 12 inches
Spanning the back part of the gallery, Spirochetes of Contact takes its name and animating figure for the biopolitics of public sex from the spirochete form (Greek for spiraling hair) of the bacterial agent of Lyme disease Borrelia burgdorferi spread by infected blacklegged ticks (known as deer ticks). Here it takes the materialized form of 28 original SX-70 Polaroid prints with their delicate surface emulsions and distinctive white borders uncovered and unprotected. These fragile originals are laid bare and exposed across the surface of a 16-foot-long lightweight, precarious and yet flexible wooden support structure that was conceived in collaboration with and fabricated by sculptor Sylvie Rosenthal to echo the sun-bleached and sea-salt rubbed wood of the boardwalk infrastructure of Fire Island, once the epicenter of the AIDS crisis (that is not over) and now ground-zero for Lyme Disease.
Jill H. Casid, “Spirochetes of Contact”, 2019, SX-70 Polaroids, wooden support structure, conceived in collaboration with and fabricated by Sylvie Rosenthal. 30 x 192 x 12 inches
Untitled (Throw Out) takes the form of an intimately-scaled video projection with a densely layered palimpsest of image and sound, weaving the Polaroids with archival shards of an incomplete correspondence, my voice spelling out the words to speculate with the other side of spell, and my increasingly smudged, tracing hand realized by Jack Kellogg. The projection is thrown out from the exposed apparatus of a small portable projector perched atop a gallery pedestal (both in the deep black of the gallery walls). And thrown onto the exposed paper surface of a rectangular mailer in the standardized 6 x 9 dimensions of the frayed envelope that launched the film’s research. The envelope’s handwritten instruction to “throw out” and “throw away” serves as the film’s central, animating vehicle. The throw length of projection and visual and audio amplification of its instruction to throw out away confront to contest the conditions of being thrown by an activated melancholy that holds fast to and keeps company with the cast out in refusing to move on into the new post-pandemic normal until there is justice and material reparation.
Jill H. Casid, “Untitled (Throw Out)”, 2017 – 2022, Video (16:30), paper envelope, projector. Conceived, written, and performed by Jill Casid and realized by Jack Kellogg
Untitled (Throw Out) takes the form of an intimately-scaled video projection with a densely layered palimpsest of image and sound, weaving the Polaroids with archival shards of an incomplete correspondence, my voice spelling out the words to speculate with the other side of spell, and my increasingly smudged, tracing hand realized by Jack Kellogg. The projection is thrown out from the exposed apparatus of a small portable projector perched atop a gallery pedestal (both in the deep black of the gallery walls). And thrown onto the exposed paper surface of a rectangular mailer in the standardized 6 x 9 dimensions of the frayed envelope that launched the film’s research. The envelope’s handwritten instruction to “throw out” and “throw away” serves as the film’s central, animating vehicle. The throw length of projection and visual and audio amplification of its instruction to throw out away confront to contest the conditions of being thrown by an activated melancholy that holds fast to and keeps company with the cast out in refusing to move on into the new post-pandemic normal until there is justice and material reparation.
Jill H. Casid, “Untitled (Throw Out)”, 2017 – 2022, Video (16:30), paper envelope, projector. Conceived, written, and performed by Jill Casid and realized by Jack Kellogg

Jill H. Casid (she/they) is Professor of Visual Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A historian, theorist, and practicing artist, Casid’s research participates in critically extending the scope of intersectional crip and queer-feminist interventions in visual studies. Casid’s hybrid research practice combines performative scholarship that pursues theorizing as a creative writing practice with a performance and photo-based art practice dedicated to developing methods for approaching the materializing force of imaging.

Casid’s Untitled (Throw Out) takes its name from the handwritten instruction (“letters: throw out”) left by their great-aunt on an envelope containing the incomplete remnants of an effort to save their mother who had been deported to the Gurs concentration camp. Casid follows its double-sided command to “throw out” as in discard and “throw out” as in to transmit to approach Hart Island and the lives buried there that are rendered disposable in what Casid calls the Necrocene. The film compels us to grapple with how to make crip, queer, trans*, and racialized life livable by holding onto our dead (i.e., melancholy) as fodder for that other sense of “throw out,” that is, to express. Flanking this film is Casid’s installation, Spirochetes of Contact, that takes us to that other New York island, Fire Island (one of the epicenters of the AIDS crisis and Lyme Disease) in the form of the boardwalk as cruising ground where we “pick up” on all its various meanings – sex, ideas, drugs, viruses, conversation. Casid heightens our felt sense of the material volatility of the original Polaroids by exposing them on top of the equally precarious support structure of the wooden boardwalk to engage us in intimate encounter with the images and their fragile supports as vulnerable material sites of and for our desire.

For Chapter 5 of Indisposable: Structures of Support after the ADA, Casid created their film, Untitled (Melancholy as Medium) that conjures with the material fragility of the Polaroid SX-70 to commune with the incalculable but still powerful presence of unredressed loss. In this film, the twin pandemics of HIV/AIDS and Covid-19 are powerfully connected to investigate how race, ability, incarceration, and sexuality continue to mark some lives as more disposable than others and to agitate for melancholy as an activist and artistic medium. Casid centers the twin ideologies of ableism and white supremacy that make both pandemics excessively lethal with bodies piling up in refrigerated morgue trucks and then buried on Hart Island, the largest mass grave in the United States, and “potter’s field,” where for decades New York City has literally disposed of the unclaimed, indigent, and stigmatized ill — such as those who died of AIDS in the early years of the pandemic.

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