The Fragility Drawings is a series of abstract and text-based compositions drawn and sewn into clinical tissue paper familiar to the institutional experience of awaiting and receiving care, diagnosis, etc. This paper is also a stage on which a person is asked to perform passive patienthood. Quagliozzi, a chronically ill and disabled artist, reorients a material known for crinkling beneath a seated or prone patient by making it the site for his tactile material investigations and hanging it on the wall behind protective glass. Tattooed across these drawings are ambiguously authored phrases such as “drawings aren’t meant to hurt,” which gives life to a meta commentary similar to David Shrigley’s taxidermied animals holding signs that read “I’m dead.” Other drawings are composed of graphite-soaked shapes tethered by sewn lines. The process of layering graphite on such a sensitive material eventually led to small tears in the paper, which he then attempted to repair by sewing. The repetition of creation, damage and repair is a cycle that reflects his own lived experience with a degenerative genetic disease somewhat regenerated by a double lung transplant.

S_D/B: How, if at all, have you used your art practice to collect or create soft(qualitative) data on a lived experience (i.e: illness, pain, grief, trauma, etc.)?

DQ: The Fragility Drawings reflect a certain collection of time data. This series first started by drawing on the clinic table tissue paper while waiting for doctors to come in for my appointments. This sort of mindless shadowing and coloring of the paper recorded time spent, the longer it took for the doctor to come in, the bigger or darker the organic shape was. A sense of illustrated crip time.