Call the Doctor

Jo Shane. Photography by Bryson Malone. Image courtesy of Blade Study.

Jo Shane slowly walks down Pike Street, followed by a videographer. The artist is stone-faced and stoic in black leather heels and a white doctor’s coat. Her short honey-blonde bob is curled neatly under her chin, rosy scowl enhanced with matte pink lipstick, eyes sharp and sensible. She enters Blade Study’s minimal facade as a crowd of onlookers film her with their iPhones through the Chinatown, New York gallery’s front window. The doctor is in: Expressionless, she sits on a little rolling stool in the back of the gallery, beside a cryotherapy machine and an ergonomic white leather chaise in which dancer and performance artist Sigrid Lauren sits, writhing and arching, both a patient and a participant. 

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In her solo exhibition on view through June 29, Shane rips through the pale blue latex of the wellness industry to expose the refrigerated rot underneath. She pivots inward as she considers death and the wellness industry’s many earthly delights proffered to stave it off. Aging. Longevity. The preposterous myth of self-preservation. “This is part of the continuum of me sharing my quest to just be okay,” she tells me during final touches on install day. “Now, when you add aging into the conversation…”

Installation view of "Jo Shane: Lilies Into the Void." Photography by Kunning Huang. Image courtesy of the artist and Blade Study.

“Lilies Into the Void” functions as both the name of the show as well as its opening gesture: at the window-facing entrance, lilies are suspended in a sushi fridge, cryogenically preserved at a controlled temperature. Their preservation is pristine, their decay postponed, but the effect is as clinical as it is ceremonial. They’re not just flowers; they’re corpses in couture. It’s the show’s central conceit—wellness as a pre-emptive burial. What is a supplement if not a tool for self-taxidermy?

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But this is not a show about longevity as conquest. It is about endurance. About trying. “I have been fighting inflammation my whole life,” Shane says, and it’s clear that she’s referring to both the bodily kind as well as the social kind. “And have had no satisfaction in the medical industry, so I proffer my journey with supplements and treatment modalities… What are you gonna do? You’re gonna try and feel better.”

Jo Shane, Lilies Into the Void, 2025. Photography by Kunning Huang. Image courtesy of the artist and Blade Study.

“Trying” is the operative word. Not succeeding. Not fixing. Not reversing. Just trying. That’s the grace of Shane’s work—its refusal to sink into moral certainty, instead a proclamation of one woman’s exploration of what it means to be truly “well.”

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The artist, now 70 years old, speaks of being unseen like it’s a rite of passage. “In postmenopause, we become invisible, right? The ghosts of society. You can walk down the street and no one notices you, and, medically, no one cares.” But Shane isn’t trying to assert her visibility in the traditional sense. Through the sculpture pieces, performance, and writing in her installation, she’s documenting, through waste, her journey into wellness. The remedies taken into her own hands. 

Jo Shane, Age Extinguisher #1, #2, #3, 2025. Photography by Kunning Huang. Image courtesy of the artist and Blade Study.

Her practice has long been preoccupied with the idea of the body as conduit for contemporary meaning: addiction, psychopharmaceuticals, bodily failure, reproductive autonomy. A formidable presence in New York’s art scene since she moved to the city over half a century ago, the Boston-raised artist studied at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in the mid-‘70s, taught at the School of Visual Arts from 1989–2013, and has shown in institutions ranging from New York’s White Columns to the Istanbul Modern. In “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” a memorable 1989 group show curated by Nan Goldin for Artists Space NYC, featuring works by David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, and Janet Stein, among others, Shane’s mixed-media assemblage Permeable Membranes, 1989, served as a memorial to artist friends she lost to AIDS.

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The body (and its limits) haunts every inch of this exhibition. A trio of fire-extinguisher boxes titled Age Extinguisher #1, #2, #3, hang side-by-side on a wall, storing the artist’s personal stash of spent supplements. Think semaglutide meets Duchamp. These objects, once hopeful instruments of longevity, are rendered futile. The cure, like time, has passed.

Jo Shane, Age Extinguisher #2, 2025. Photography by Kunning Huang. Image courtesy of the artist and Blade Study.

In Age Extinguisher #2, 2025, Shane arranges a semaglutide vial, an alcohol pad, and a used needle in a blue-lit fire extinguisher case, creating a narrative of a journey we’re not entirely privy to. On the gallery’s parallel wall is The Temple of Longevity, 2025, a cruciform of metal photographic transfers wherein lies the simulacra of her research and development. The cross is not as much religious as it is a symbol of industrial, tech-bro spiritualism writ large. Promotional material from the Don't Die Summit, a grotesque self-help symposium launched by life-extension mogul Bryan Johnson (infamous for his unconventional methods of biohacking), is repurposed by Shane as an absurd sacred text. Fragments of Johnson’s branding are photo-transferred on metal plates; decontextualized, their command to live as long as possible now taunts.

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The exhibition is built around the idea of the uncanny valley, not only in the classical sense (our discomfort toward almost-human objects), but also in the daily absurdities of the wellness marketplace: The uncanny revulsion at seeing our own reflection in the glowing vials of semaglutide, the “skinny drug” that can be found in Ozempic. Our own attempts to mimic vitality with goops, capsules, and injections available on the market as a kind of magic. The uncanny insistence that the vitamin aisle is a panacea, a capitalist cathedral of embalming fluids masquerading as cures.

Jo Shane, Temple of Longevity, 2025. Photography by Kunning Huang. Image courtesy of the artist and Blade Study.

Two writing works anchor the exhibition intellectually. The first, titled L.O.N.G.E.V.I.T.Y., 2025, reads like an anti-manifesto, a ragged plea against the toxicity of wellness culture. “Everyone’s sick,” Shane writes, “everyone has dysregulation.” It’s part confession, part battle cry, underscoring the show’s subtle thesis: Inflammation is everywhere, in our bodies, our institutions, our economy. The second piece connects this to capitalism’s bloating logic, a sociogenic illness fed by banner ads and microtargeting, promising health if we just buy a little more L-theanine, ashwagandha, vitamins D and E. Take this for your gut, that for your brain. Consume until you feel good.

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But what does feeling good mean anymore? Who gets to define it? And who gets to afford it? These questions crescendo in The Treatment Suite, 2025, the exhibition’s final scene and most literal: a fully-operational cryotherapy machine, a localized treatment that uses extreme cold to reduce inflammation; Alongside it is a white leather treatment chair. Shane will be using the machine on willing participants to try a bit of the artist’s own routine. 

Jo Shane, The Treatment Suite, 2025. Photography by Kunning Huang. Image courtesy of the artist and Blade Study.

“In terms of Western medicine, doctors tend to just throw it at the brain, as if clinical depression and anxiety are the root of all bodily issues, a diagnosis that gets exercised particularly on women and specifically on older women,” Shane says. “There is no patience or compassion towards us.”  She is not here to reject technology or dismiss the industry entirely, but to show that in an overwrought medical industry, people seeking betterment or even bodily relief must become, at once, facilitator and participant in their own health. She’s here to expose its contradictions via her own wellness journey, to shine the gallery light on the absurd rituals and private sacrifices. Her body becomes the site of inquiry, the altar, and the evidence.

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At the opening night performance, visitors witness Shane mid-procedure, facing the cold without flinching. It’s not spectacle, but survival. Performance art as an act of bodily persistence, endurance in the face of the failure of Western medicine and pharmaceutical industry. In the end, “Lilies Into the Void” is not just about aging, or wellness, or even death. It’s about the psychic labor of maintaining a body in a world that makes it impossible. Shane isn’t trying to turn back time. She’s trying to metabolize it. You might leave the gallery wondering what’s in your vitamin stack, and why it’s there. That’s the point.

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“Jo Shane: Lilies Into the Void” is on view through June 29, 2025, at Blade Study at 17 Pike St, New York, NY 10002.