In 2007, images and descriptions of my installation, Side Effects were included in a chapter of Petra Kuppers’ book, The Scar Of Visibility: Medical Performances And Contemporary Art. In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers examined the use of medical imagery practices in contemporary art, as well as different arts of everyday life (self-help groups, community events, Internet sites), focusing on fantasies and “knowledge projects” surrounding the human body.
“De Lellis’s series, ‘Side Effects’ shows a range of different pills, their identifying marks and different shapes and sizes, in a disco-ball-like, festive, and colorful environment. The manipulation of of psychosis and schizophrenia diagnoses by medication, the treatment of choice within biomedicine, is refigured into a carnivalesque hallucinatory vision. . . Ambivalence hangs over the exhibition: a fascination and revulsion, attraction and denunciation, a buying in and buying out”
“The flash of science, and its miraculous color effects, beams, transpositions, and traversals, glistens on the photo paper.”
– The Scar Of Visibility: Medical Performances And Contemporary Art
2007 (University of Minnesota Press), on Side Effects, an installation