New Grit: Art & Philly Now
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
Featured The Last Course Installation
May 7 - August 22, 2021
The Last Course debuted in 2021 as a major commissioned installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, presented as one of the most ambitious works in New Grit: Art & Philly Now, an exhibition highlighting 25 contemporary artists with ties to Philadelphia. Curated by Elisabeth Agro, the show explored themes of resilience, identity, and innovation. My contribution transformed a gallery into an immersive, site-specific dining room installation that drew deeply from my lifelong experience with Type 1 Diabetes. Developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project became a meditation on survival, vulnerability, and the rituals of care—an environment where medical history, biometric data, and personal narrative intertwined through digital craft and historic material culture.
At the heart of The Last Course stood two digitally fabricated epergnes—reinterpretations of 18th-century silver centerpieces, based on a 1774 sterling silver design by Norwegian silversmith Emick Römer. Using CAD modeling, CT scans of my skull and arm, and data from my continuous glucose monitor (CGM), I constructed skeletal forms in glass-filled nylon that served as both opulent artifacts and memento mori. Simulated cloth baskets atop each form carried hyperreal faux confections—3D-printed chocolates modeled on diabetic wounds and internal anatomy. These seductive yet grotesque offerings evoked the paradox of indulgence within chronic illness. One of the epergnes was accessioned into the museum’s permanent collection, linking the piece to the museum’s historic holdings in silver and decorative arts. Following the exhibition, The Last Course Epergne was acquired into the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection, marking a significant milestone in my career and ensuring that the work would remain in conversation with the museum’s holdings of historic silver and decorative arts.
The installation also featured a bone terrazzo moat table, its altar-like surface inspired by Medici wedding banquets and surgical tables. Constructed from animal bone embedded in resin, the table circulated purified water through a channel at its perimeter, symbolizing containment, circulation, and the closed-loop systems that define diabetes management. Floating within were flesh-colored, 3D-printed vessels holding symbolic sweets, echoing themes of restriction, temptation, and bodily control.
Mounted on one wall were four elongated trays, each depicting skulls in sequential motion across sterile white fields. These images progressed like animation frames, capturing the cyclical and unpredictable rhythms of blood glucose management. The installation’s visual cadence recalled repetition and inevitability, creating a solemn meditation on stasis, change, and chronic illness.
The gallery itself was transformed through hand-painted boiserie, wainscoting, and a custom frieze, drawing on 18th-century neoclassicism. Embedded within the ornamental motifs were CGM graphs and biometric data, seamlessly merging decorative form with the internal rhythms of the body. This architectural intervention served as narrative infrastructure, placing illness and control at the core of aesthetic refinement.
A Victorian-style parlor dome offered an autobiographical counterpoint to the larger installation. Modeled after glass displays once used to showcase taxidermy and botanical specimens, the dome housed personal artifacts collected over two decades. These included an electroplated crown representing personal milestones; flesh-like chocolates in a 3D-printed basket symbolizing the fusion of technology and flesh; a sterling silver PEZ dispenser that transformed a disposable candy object into an heirloom; and Transmet, a brooch referencing transmetatarsal amputation, rendered as wearable evidence of trauma. Together, the objects formed an emotional archive of resilience, vulnerability, and transformation.
Scattered throughout the installation were trompe l’oeil confections—hyperrealistic sweets that revealed themselves, on closer inspection, as anatomical forms. These objects blurred the line between desire and decay, engaging with themes of sweetness, suffering, pleasure, and pathology. As a final participatory gesture, I collaborated with Shane’s Confectionery—the oldest operating candy shop in the U.S.—to produce a limited run of grotesquely realistic, handmade buttercream-filled chocolates inspired by my 3D-printed models. Tinted to match a range of skin tones, these confections were distributed at the exhibition's closing, collapsing the boundary between art and sustenance.
The Last Course was not merely an installation but a deeply personal reckoning with my body, its fragility, and the legacy of chronic illness. It was a period room staged in the moment between indulgence and consequence—a space of beauty and decay, discipline and longing. Like a final offering at a ceremonial feast, the work invited viewers to reflect on what it means to live within the constraints of disease and the personal and communal rituals that sustain us.