Patient / Belongings: Megan Bent

In Patient / Belongings, Megan Bent presents a selection of photographic meditations from the series I Don’t Want to Paint A Silver Lining Around It, which centers the artist’s experience as a disabled person throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Vivid reproductions of chlorophyll prints on leaves presented alongside their originals speak to exquisite and fleeting realities of human life.

As much as the content of Megan Bent’s imagery begs us to understand the difficulties of disability, it invests equal time into reframing the way that we perceive the state of being disabled. In her own understanding of her degenerative illness, the artist has embraced the disability concept of “Crip Time,” which values slowness, care and attention over speed and constant production.

While the world has become accustomed to photography’s sleek, digital edges, Bent’s practice actively rejects this standard in favor of radically surprising processes that embrace the temporary materiality of the natural world. Patient / Belongings features decaying leaves that hold fleeting records in chlorophyll: as these light-sensitive substrates are exposed to the world, the imagery they hold will inevitably disappear.