For the Left Hand Alone

Gallery Hours

M–F: 10 am–6 pm; Sa&Su: 10 am–5 pm

Karilynn Ming Ho uses the metaphor of phantom limb syndrome to explore themes of fragmented realities in a time when bombardment by digital information leaves many people feeling physically and mentally disconnected and disenchanted with reality.

In an experience of a phantom limb, a person is haunted by what once was: a limb, now amputated, continues to aggravate the mind like an uncatchable itch. The phenomenon is considered to be a neurological condition—a hallucination rather than a fiction—where a set of feelings no longer corresponds to a material reality. In an increasingly technologically mediated world, we are exposed to a multiplicity of objects, affects, and bodies. They all claim authenticity, and yet they remain phantoms; images and representations that can be felt, but never embraced.

Set to the musical commissions of Paul Wittgenstein (a one-handed pianist), For the Left Hand Alone frames phantom pain as an unrequited longing, an incomplete figure, and the feeling of uncertainty in an increasingly disembodied world. This work premiered at Images Festival at Trinity Square Video, Toronto, in 2017.

Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts for their support in the production of this work.