scars

I approached conventional galleries, but they said, ‘Look, nobody wants an intestinal reconstruction hanging over the couch.’

Artist Ted Meyer on his exhibition Scared for Life, now hanging at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, as quoted in this morning's paper.

On the pile with the short films I've always meant to but never managed to make is a film called "Scars", in which folks with scars would tell the story of how they came by theirs.

Sounds like Meyer's done something like that with his new show, which features works in which "he applies block-print ink to the scars and the skin around them and then presses paper to skin to make several direct contact images, which he highlights slightly with gouache and pencil."

There's also a group at Flickr called Scars and Their Stories dedicated to telling scar stories -- although I've never had the stomach to stick around long enough to find out how well it succeeds.

(There's so much story in a scar.)