Corrie Slawson’s “None of us really know what we look like inside” was displayed in the KSU Downtown Gallery from January 30, 2026 to March 7, 2026.
I visited the exhibit in February and was intrigued by the designs, which showed abstract depictions of what the inside of the human body could look like.
“Corrie Slawson’s work engages a matrix of social, political, environmental, and cultural concerns,” read the plaque explaining the exhibit, which “includes work from the past year of mixed media paintings, drawings and prints that can only imagine what it looks like inside our bodies. A 2022 trip to Assisi, Italy the same day as another historical event that spurred this research.”
Continues the plaque, “The surfaces of the works are where visceral events grow and bloom into pictures, devoid of stops or starts except maybe in distant retrospect, fading in and out, overlapping, crumbling, hemorrhaging sudden color.”
The pieces were displayed on plain walls in a large, open room. The gallery gave viewers space to move around and observe the pieces from different angles. There was also a massive window on one side of the exhibit, allowing natural light to come through and illuminate the pieces.
I caught on to the bodily theme of the artworks before even reading the description. In many of them, you can see the obvious twists of intestines and vascular structures. Slawson used many colors that wouldn’t typically be thought of when depicting anatomy: many pieces used typical reds and blues, but mixed in orange, green and yellow to create more vibrant, and sometimes even cartoonish, renditions of some anatomical structures.
I loved the artist’s interpretation of different organs, and I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly inspired these pieces. The description mentioned a historic event in 2022, but it did not specify which one, so I decided to do some research for myself.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 court ruling that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. While I don’t know for sure that this is what inspired the pieces, it makes a lot of sense to me, especially with most of the artworks depicting lower abdominal, intestinal, and pelvic parts of the body.
Overall, I thought the pieces were extremely creative and beautiful. The pictures are interesting on their own, but it was even more interesting to find out more about the inspiration behind it.
