Charlie Gross
Six Weeks, 2016–19
Single-channel video
Patient interviews with score by Meshell Ndegeocello
Commissioned by the 2019 NLE Curatorial Lab
In 2017, as part of his residency at Kings County Hospital Center, artist and psychotherapist Charlie Gross photographed and interviewed young adults in the hospital’s six-week hospitalization program during their transition out of inpatient stay. Aged in their 20’s and coming from all over New York City, many suffered from a variety of traumas and diagnoses. The resulting project, Six Weeks, is a collaborative product of conversations between the artist and patients that goes beyond reductive labeling and stigma of diagnosis. Instead, these images serve as documentation for these precarious lives, and more broadly, for those on the margins of a flawed mental health system.