About the In Sickness and In Health Project:
The purpose of this project was to make people think about their health as well as their risk of getting certain diseases. Typically this is something that people don't necessarily want to think about, but the truth of the matter is that if you are not thinking about sickness, then you can't plan to be healthy. In our humanities class, we created oral history videos about a person in our family that has had the disease we are studying.
I created this oral history video about my great grandmother who had Alzheimer's disease:
The purpose of this project was to make people think about their health as well as their risk of getting certain diseases. Typically this is something that people don't necessarily want to think about, but the truth of the matter is that if you are not thinking about sickness, then you can't plan to be healthy. In our humanities class, we created oral history videos about a person in our family that has had the disease we are studying.
I created this oral history video about my great grandmother who had Alzheimer's disease:
My group and I created a painting to show how neurological diseases can affect people as well as how it can be prevented. The person in the painting is very thin and frail, we chose to make it this way because of the fact that people with Alzheimer's Disease can begin to lose weight in later stages. The person can be seen with strands of DNA wrapped around his body, which is supposed to represent how your genes can be a burden on your health. The book on the top of the painting represents the idea that keeping your brain stimulated can be a good way to prevent the disease.
We also created self portrait paintings titled: "Pieces of Me"
The idea behind these products was to create a visually representation of ourselves in a symbolic and biological way. I decided to paint my background as the ocean along with some trees and rocks because I really like to be out in nature. I felt that this was a great way to tie in a representation of myself with biology, as biology is the science of life and living organisms.
We conducted interviews with scientists, researchers and doctors that study the diseases the students are profiling. We wanted to learn more about current and novel research being conducted with regards to the top four killer diseases in the U.S. One of the interview questions prompted us to share their research or day to day activity visually to be commissioned in an art piece. We used their ideas to portray what the researcher does on a daily basis. Finally, we transcribed their entire recorded interview and displayed it with a summary of the researcher as the artist statement.
This was the creative commission that I decided to create for UCSD researcher James Brewer Ph.D. :
This was the creative commission that I decided to create for UCSD researcher James Brewer Ph.D. :
The week before exhibition the eleventh was very hectic as we prepared for our In Sickness And In Health Exhibition. There was still a lot to be done before our family, friends, and community members would come and see all of the work we have done so far this year. In order to make our classroom look presentable by exhibition night, we were broken into groups. Each group was responsible for one area of our classroom. I was selected for the art group, and was responsible for setting up the biology classroom and putting up our creative commission pieces.
With only a little more than a week to prepare for exhibition, I was worried that I wouldn't have enough time to prepare a good speech , but doing practice run throughs really helped me to be more confident in my speech. The most valuable experience of exhibition was the moment I realized that we had an amazing exhibition because we put in the hard work earlier and were able to teach the community about our content, not just a flashy display. A moment that sums up this exhibition for me was when I was explaining the Pieces of Me project to someone and they commented on how well our whole team could connect our projects together. This moment made me extremely grateful and proud to be a part of this team and this amazing exhibition. I was the most proud when we were informed that we were the first exhibition to produce no trash!