In response to the global pandemic, museums, galleries, libraries, and archives around the world have opened their collections and exhibitions to the public through online platforms, rethinking art's role in society where survival is a primary driving force. This exhibition aims to activate thirty digital reproductions of paintings, drawings, prints, objects, music, and photographs in the public domain by many artists from institutional art history and collections of museums, exploring artistic expressions of health and mortality--not to romanticise, but rather, to borrow their contexts to contemporary understanding.

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In 1794, the English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827) illustrated the archetype of reason as a bearded man separating light and darkness with a compass he had set to the Earth. Bearing this architectural tool, reason creates and constrains the universe—designing the world and humanity under universal laws and conventions of society. In the last days of his life, the artist was commissioned for a reproduction of this piece for a sum greater than his previous works, and while bedridden—he threw the tinted copy exclaiming “There, that will do! I cannot mend it.”

By re-exhibiting digitized copies of previously-restricted works and sharing their contexts in the online public sphere, these works lend their historicity into immediacy, thereby creating the potential for a new compass. This curatorial study hopes to reflect on the role of institutional art history in the circumstance of present survival by intimating on the statement, "There, that's it! I cannot mend it.” -- an act of service, the acceptance of limitation, and the renouncing of power to a bigger, more capable mender.

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John Alexis Balaguer