The project that became May Cause Side Effects began long before it was reframed by illness. It started in the small, absurd, private architecture of the bathroom. In my 2017 senior thesis at Cooper Union, I turned to that room as a site of ritual and rupture. A public yet private space where we prepare, hide, answer a text, change our face for a night out, and mark the moment when something in our life has changed. Those tiny actions register as time, an index of becoming. The bathroom was then for me a place of discovery and deliberate exposure, beautiful and, quietly, disturbing.

The works in May Cause Side Effects carry both histories. The earlier thesis viewed the bathroom as a form of social architecture. The latter experience rendered that architecture a lifeline. Waiting, the slow, suspended time of illness and recovery, is the show’s condition. Waiting is not passive here. It is an active, material practice. It is the way the body exists between tests and results, between dosing and relief, between being observed and being alone. It is the time in which the self is remade.