Inflamed nipple tips, forms encrusted with pain and other sediments of living, the enervating discomforts of being in a body in need of care: In her objects, ink drawings, and video piece, Alicia Link searingly probes the struggle for reproductive rights and basic health care that femme, gender nonconforming, and transgender people find themselves in, one year after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

In 2022, Link began attempting to address the debilitating pain she was experiencing due to a medical issue. As she reflects on her recent efforts to navigate our increasingly stymied and invasive medical system, she conjures organs and other deeply interior spaces of the body, turning them inside out where their raw surfaces may breathe against the air, and she places them into the everyday liminal space of the doctor’s waiting room. Gynecological tools and devices are hermetically sealed into hospital cubicle curtains that are patterned with images from the artist’s own hysteroscopy. Standing in for the sinister and ever-mercurial Billing Department, a grubby sculpted phone rests indefinitely off the hook.

As Link’s forms wait, and wait, they seem to be in a state of transmutation. They are on the verge. They fester, curdle, seethe. Some of the forms sprout legs, though these newfangled limbs look unable to bear weight or to get up and carry their beings away from this place. Their anger reminds us that interventions for pain and life-threatening medical events cannot wait. Their interminable patience asks for action.

curation, documentation, and text by Addison Namnoum















A Woman's Guide to Self Defense from Alicia Link on Vimeo.
















































when it starts, we will let the host know you are waiting

curator: Kevin Brophy

(Reading, PA, April 19, 2023) When it starts, we will let the host know you are waiting is a multimedia installation by Philadelphia-based artist Alicia Link that addresses inequity through the visual language of the gynecologist’s office and waiting room. This ‘everyday’ space illustrates the often subtle violence of inequity enacted upon certain bodies. Working from personal experiences, the artist highlights hostility towards femme, gender nonconforming, and transgender bodies in the US through the guise of providing protection and care.

In the summer of 2022, due to a medical issue the artist was shuffled between three different medical institutions. These spaces were unequivocally institutional; they were messy yet impersonal, and mired in the sterility of bureaucracy. Since then, the artist has been ruminating on the true vulnerability of a body processed by a profession wherein care and comfort are necessary but housed in a space absent of those qualities. When the human body enters this space it becomes a site of data harvesting and profit. The medical institution becomes a shakedown.

With tactile sculptures, ink drawings, and media work Alicia Link builds a new body, one of the estranged anatomies of the waiting room. Quotidian objects are reinvented into the abject: hysteroscopy curtains quilted with hermetically sealed artifacts, a line of anthropomorphic chairs enveloping the remnants of patients past—a watch, an insurance card, and worn magazines. Isolated from the rest of the installation, alone along the gallery wall sits the Billing Department, represented by a phone permanently off the hook.





















video still, WIP, 2021-2022



video still, WIP, 2021-2022






video still, WIP, 2021-2022









Beach Body Parts (shells), 2021- 2022
Plaster casts and watercolor











                                                                        Bolt from the Blue, 2022
                                                                        Ink, watercolor, oil paint, flocking, fabric, pins, and fiber fill on canvas
                                                                       














                                                                                Beach Prop, 2021
                                                                                Sand, papier-mache, glue, raffia, and plaster shells









































Syrena, 2020- 2021

A mixed media installation that conflates the turbulent and tragic histories of the Polish matriarchs
in Link‘s family with the monument of a mermaid  located in Warsaw’s “Old Town.”






                                                                                   
                   




























Syrena (clip) from Alicia Link on Vimeo












                                                                                 



           





   







































    Hiding from Nazis
    water color, gouache, marker, and pastel on paper
    12 in x 16 in
    2019


Borscht Babies
ink, pencil, and watercolor on paper
2021