Pain Management: POP Art
Pain Management crafts correspondence, then parades to the
Cleveland Post Office in Hillcrest, San Diego to disseminate a registered
demand public health care laws be enforced, declaring the message's value at
the estimated worth of the artist's life.
Chronic pain is susceptible to dismissal through broad
diagnostic categories, financial dependence, and a legally 'disabled'
status. Pain Management stages the
opportunity to POP out and graciously appears in the public forum most
frequented--lines out the door: the local post office.
The correspondence exercise’s one mother’s manner:
traditional practice punctuated by thank you cards, seldom honored unless
drafted by a lawyer. This demand refuses
shame, consistently declaring the value of its contents, a guess at the value
of the artist’s life. Leaves, creamy
yellow stationary, waft through the channels of the United States Postal
Service’s tributaries to reach the advocates for others similarly stockpiled in
the barrels of pharmacopeia warehouses: the Ehlers-Danlos National Foundation,
the Federal Medicare and Medicaid Service, and numerous legal and health care
professionals with an eye for turning phrases to their patients’ and clients’ purposes.
Put the world back in balance by facilitating, at the same
time, the POP presentation's consistency in declaring the value of its
contents, a guess at the value of my own life to date, $354 million, a smidge
over the $99,999.99 cap for a registered mailing, and its actual security in
the record by dissemination through paying the remaining USPS shipping fees for
that capped value.
The upcoming post office performance, ("POP"),
Pain Management, calls upon a Southern California Medi-Cal Clinic to provide
promised acupuncture and traction upon the authority of physical therapists but
delayed in its delivery by several months.
The most ambitious of Rachel MacCratic's POP art works to date, Pain
Management parades to the Cleveland Post Office in Hillcrest, San Diego a path
pranced nearly twenty times in her first year of residency at Robplex. POPs' quests have been to effectively exact
continuity of health care, perturb the practice of clearinghouse diagnostics,
and, having won those artifacts from ossified behemoths, now pursues
perseverance in the insistence on the actual value of every patient without
regard for their station by classist phylogeny or stratification. The players, ("POPrs"), past have always
giggled publicly, enjoy arranging stamps, speculate as to the portents of
insuring a message that could mean life or death, have friendly spectators, and
include the United States Postal Service's workers. POPrs always dress-up funny, smile at passersby,
avoid metered mail whenever possible, talk to people in line, create games, and
make the United States Postal Service workers laugh. Its type is a template for others to take and
tailor to fit the similarly situated by addressing itself to the Ehlers-Danlos
National Foundation, the California Health & Human Service Agencies, health
care and legal professionals in Southern California, and the Federal Centers
for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
An integration of Rachel MacCratic's design, licensure in the
legal medium in the State of California, and spatial explorations is informed
by traditionally professional and feminine work roles: Pain Management queers
those roles, totes by pedance correspondence to the public forum, attracts a
spectator for the record, and sends pleas in the playful parlay with a fellow
public servant. This course registers the letter to its direct recipient, one
recalcitrant clinic. Conceptual agit
prop takes to the local post office to challenge by subliminal demand letter, a
mailing declared at some sum, the value of a human life handled with the care
required, but seldom taken, by our Social Security and Affordable Care Acts.
Rachel MacCratic earned her BFA at UC
Riverside, painted at Douglas Keith's studio, and then designed media for
student and professional organizations. Showing
first at the Sweeney Art Gallery, she continued to display paintings using
women's clothing in downtown Riverside's erstwhile community art spaces. She
designed her costumes and makeup while performing roles in street theatrics and
The Circus of [Im]migration, with C.I.R.C.A's Border Patrol in San Diego, at UC
Berkeley, Station 40 in San Francisco, and the Bike Church in Santa Cruz,
California.
The recent works craft rituals and beauty
spectacles to add complexity to the dominant beauty standard and balance a safe
space with diverse participants' interests through an approximately annual,
queer fashion show through 2014.
She received commissions and donated work
auctioned for charity beginning in 2005. She is a resident artist holding daily
studio hours at Robplex and an attorney licensed in the State of California.
The Law Office of Rachel MacCratic provides the production
infrastructure in the means for printing, for example. It also provides access to POPrs with the
expertise to perform in the public space in conjunction with the collection of
community members working with the individual artist. The Ehlers-Danlos Foundation and the United
States Postal Service are passive institutional partners, at this time, in that
they are recipients or beneficiaries of the work. However, they are also integral to its
production in that they each provide private and civil infrastructure for
recordation and dissemination in the public forum. San Diego IndyMedia is the artist's choice for local media coverage.
Materials/Supplies $1,371.00
Travel/Lodging $1,600.00
Artist Honorarium $3,600.00
Blind Courtesy Copy to One Additional Name and Addressee
According to Demand $25.00
Administrative Fee $6,210.00
Meals $183.00
Shipping/Dissemination/Presentation Fees $64,511.00
Courtesy Copies to Ten Additional Names and Addressees
According to Demand $1,000.00
Incorporation of Three Named Supporters in Letter Body
According to Demand $1,500.00
