Sonja
Langford

x-ray boxes

This ongoing body of work uses vintage x-ray light boxes as vessels for reckoning with the clinical gaze. Each installation reframes these once-instrumental tools of diagnosis into intimate, speculative spaces of reflection. The boxes act not only as light sources but as reliquaries, haunted by what they once revealed and what they now withhold.

Grouped differently each time they are exhibited, the x-ray boxes operate as modular installations. In some iterations, I create x-rays from objects and text found in archives and from objects and text I have fabricated. Their arrangement shifts with each space, echoing the instability of memory, illness, and interpretation. They invite a slowness of looking—an insistence on opacity rather than clarity.

This work exists alongside my broader research into the gendered history of American gynecology, the role of visual evidence in medical power, and the ways bodies are rendered legible (or illegible) through institutional lenses.