Notes on a Scattered Subject in Montmartre

The work of artist/anthropologist Susan Marie Ossman and her 12-station exhibition in Montmartre in 2020 lends itself to a personal meditation on art and illness during a global pandemic. Walking the neighborhood where the installations were created and assembled, Ossman’s artwork becomes a means of transforming the experience of chemotherapy and suggests how the cancer treatments themselves refl ect on a larger society of illness. Most importantly, in her work Ossman examines the notion of a self-portrait: what it is and how we might understand the genre as well as the self differently.