Hand to Mouth: Personal Loss, Public Health, and Inequitable Access to Dental Care in America
In “Hand to Mouth,” I examine inequities in access to dental care through the lens of my experience navigating America’s dental care system. I use visual language to distill the complex connections between societal forces and personal struggle. Our dental industry prioritizes the vanity of the wealthy over the health of the poor through a broken, inequitable system. From the shortage of dentists who accept Medicaid, to the cost of dental school, to insurance reimbursement rates, to job insecurity, to transportation access, and eventually, to the discrimination, social stigma, and health consequences associated with missing teeth, poor oral health and poverty endlessly feed off each other. I seek to illuminate this issue, one of many manifestations of economic injustice in America. My project couples cyanotypes made from my x-rays, paintings of my mouth, and other art works incorporating my lost teeth. My project seeks to bring awareness, evoke empathy, and nullify judgment and shame surrounding this issue. I juxtapose physical evidence from my body against statistics and narrative. Dancing the line between beauty and revulsion, I mourn personal loss while celebrating the resilience of the human spirit. The goal of my project is to humanize this public health crisis.
In “Hand to Mouth,” I examine inequities in access to dental care through the lens of my experience navigating America’s dental care system. I use visual language to distill the complex connections between societal forces and personal struggle. Our dental industry prioritizes the vanity of the wealthy over the health of the poor through a broken, inequitable system. From the shortage of dentists who accept Medicaid, to the cost of dental school, to insurance reimbursement rates, to job insecurity, to transportation access, and eventually, to the discrimination, social stigma, and health consequences associated with missing teeth, poor oral health and poverty endlessly feed off each other. I seek to illuminate this issue, one of many manifestations of economic injustice in America. My project couples cyanotypes made from my x-rays, paintings of my mouth, and other art works incorporating my lost teeth. My project seeks to bring awareness, evoke empathy, and nullify judgment and shame surrounding this issue. I juxtapose physical evidence from my body against statistics and narrative. Dancing the line between beauty and revulsion, I mourn personal loss while celebrating the resilience of the human spirit. The goal of my project is to humanize this public health crisis.
