'Para(site)dise Art Fields'
William King Museum of Art presents “Para(site)dise,” a solo exhibition by Johnson City, Tennessee, artist Jocelyn Mathewes. The exhibit is on view Aug. 20, through Jan. 10, 2027, as part of the museum’s McGlothlin Exhibition Series. The exhibition brings together over a decade of mixed-media work documenting the interior experience of chronic illness — its labor, its repetitions and the cost of maintaining a body the world cannot see is sick.
Mathewes works with the materials illness generates: prescription sheets, IV tubing, hospital bracelets, discarded pill packs and gauze. Alongside medical detritus, she draws on the domestic archive — vintage recipe cards, road maps, quilts, cyanotype-printed fabric — layering processes and objects into works that hold grief, dark wit and something close to reverence.
The exhibition takes its title from Mathewes’ ongoing large-scale installation: paper constructions built from cyanotype prints of weeds pulled from her garden. As the installation grows to cover an entire wall, the metaphor deepens: chronic illness is also a kind of weed, managed and held at bay, pulled and returning. The labor required to maintain functional homeostasis is largely invisible. Para(site)dise makes it visible and lets it overtake the room.
Key works include “Never the Same Again,” sculptures built from IV tubing, wire, and bent Slinkys that figure a body altered but still moving; “Medicine Threshold,” an interactive sculptural curtain of prescription bottles and shredded money; “Symptoms/Side-Effects,” a spiraling origami loop made from prescription sheets; and “30 Days,” collages built from Betty Crocker recipe cards, road maps and medical detritus.
Mathewes has long looked to Flannery O’Connor as a touchstone — O’Connor’s description of illness as a place where nobody else can follow. Mathewes has built an art practice in that solitary country, but the work is fundamentally an act of invitation.
Mathewes is the founder of EAT/ART space, an alternative gallery operating out of her home dining room in East Tennessee, which has featured 50+ artists across 24 exhibitions since 2020. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Reece Museum, and her cyanotype practice has been published internationally, including two editions of Christina Z. Anderson’s definitive cyanotype survey (2019, 2023), multiple features in The HAND Magazine, and Image Journal issue #118.
There are several events associated with the exhibit. A reception is held Aug. 19 at 5:30 p.m. for museum members only. Exhibit Opening with Live Storytelling is held Thursday, Aug. 20 at 4 p.m., featuring storyteller Hannah Harvey, in partnership with the International Storytelling Center. Tours at Four: Free Public Tour is offered Friday, Aug. 21, at 4 p.m., led by curator Russell Facemire. Members’ Morning is held Wednesday, Aug. 26 at 10 a.m., for members only. RSVP to attend by contacting the museum at rsvp@wkmuseum.org.
