Original Art by Zoe Rose Kriegler-Wenk
Title Mind-Body Staring Contest (2026)
Media Magazine clippings, paper, glue
Caption by Zoe Rose Kriegler-Wenk and Christy Rentmeester
This collage plays with mirroring and perspective to explore relationships among cognitive, physical, and emotional dimensions of health experiences. The term cognitive dissonance was introduced in 1957 by Leon Festinger, and has been influential since. Cognitive dissonance is one concept that can deepen our understandings of what it’s like to be (professional or nonprofessional) caregivers or patients in a health care system seemingly overwrought. Cognitive dissonance characterizes discomfort, distress, and confusion arising from conflict and fragmentation among, say, clinical expectations, ethical values, and demands placed on clinicians, patients, and their loved ones.
When trying to meet navigational demands of complex health systems, health information, and clinical encounters, many different players in health service delivery streams do well to attend closely to how their own bodies respond to these demands. A viewer of this work might consider questions like these:
- How many figures or partial figures inhabit this image?
- Which roles do color and contrast play in how a viewer discerns relationships among the figures?
- Which gestures might be construed as forging connection or meaning and why?
This collage focuses specifically on gesture, contact, and interplay among figures. Individually assembled, figures are incomplete, yet simultaneously constitutive of the image as a whole. Perhaps listening to our individual bodies while recognizing our interconnectedness can keep us from downward-spiraling rumination about whether, when, and how our needs will be met. Within this work, a viewer is invited to visually locate an arm of one figure within the head of another figure, for example. Viewers are offered a chance to take space and time to consider, integrate, embody, and respond to what health care today requires of clinicians, patients, and our loved ones.
Share an ethics problem, case, or health care experience you’d like QHC to help you investigate.
Question Health Care 