Dr. Super Igor

When sickness takes hold of our bodies, we seek refuge in small white rooms for brief and at times baffling expert advice. More familiar with our bodies than ourselves, the doctor knows something about us that remains illegible. In Dr. Super Igor (MD) we are repeatedly diagnosed, turned into a scene of innumerable readings. Gentle, well intentioned, clumsy, and cryptic, Dr. Igor organizes our interior life and feels “invigorated” as he does so. When we’re not patients in his examination room, we play therapist to his confessions about life as a doctor, his adamant beliefs and personal insecurities, his longing for physical contact. Borrowing from self-help culture, modernist poetry, and colloquial metaphor, Igor helps us picture our illness in language. Performance and painting merge to explore how symptoms are read like marks and how our bodies are consequently marked by diagnoses. This is a journey through Dr. Igor’s scientific imagination, at the divide between sight and touch, empirical evidence and projection, preventative care and intervention, informed consent and blind trust. Patrick McElnea is an artist based in New York who exhibits his work internationally. He teaches experimental video and drawing at Vassar College.