Monica Ong is a new media artist who creates multi-media installations and interactive narratives about cultural silences and public health.
where culture and public health overlap
Monica + Emmelyn examine innovations in the arts and medicine, culture and science, and how creative collaboration advances public health.
Sunday, August 21, 2011 at 07:40AM 
I'm pleased to share that my visual poem "Corona Mestiza" has recently been published in the Summer 2011 issue of the Lantern Review, a national journal of Asian American poetry.
This piece is a portrait of my father, told through the visual language and typography of the CT scan.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 06:04AM The opening of Critical Condition: When Silence Speaks was a great success! Thanks to Steve Olsen, my installation specialist, for all his hard work. Check out the highlights of the evening as well we the work.
The exhibition will be up through September 16, 2011. Please contact the Parachute Factory at 203-764-7594 for directions and gallery hours. They did tell me they can make weekend appointments.
Saturday, June 11, 2011 at 06:42AM 
Critical Condition opens on July 12 at the Parachute Factory in New Haven. It is an exciting group exhibition not only of artists but also of citizen storytellers via the Center for Digital Storytelling's Silence Speaks Initiative. This exhibition seeks to expose the stories about health that you don't hear, narratives that are underreported, undocumented, and untranslated. And I felt really compelled to open a space for these stories to exists in so that we can think about how it informs the way we seek out health. It seeks to question the structure of the global healthcare system where it is all too easy for women or the other to be invisible.
Featured artists
Liana Dragoman, Monica Ong, Silvia Rigon, and the Center for Digital Storytelling
Operning Reception
Tuesday July 12, 6–8 pm
Gallery Hours
Wednesday: 10 am – 2 pm
Thursday + Friday: 12–5 pm
+ by appointment
Parachute Factory
Erector Square, Building 1
319 Peck Street
New Haven, CT 06513
Statement
This exhibition positions the body as a stage – where embedded beliefs and social constructs collide and re-emerge as transformative narratives about cultural anomalies in public health. These artists and storytellers gather voices of witness and meditation, asking questions that are poignant but pointed.
What happens when a woman’s body cannot be translated? Why do scars persist and what do they teach us about silenced histories? When aberrations in cell growth spell out a terminal condition, what happens to our illusion of security? How do we contend with stigma in the face of sexual abuse or mental illness? These ruptures call on us to revisit – and redefine – the social conditions from which they erupt, spill, and burn into our shared memory.
Please support this collective of women artists for Critical Condition, an exhibition giving voice to important community issues in public health. All donated funds will help to make this show possible at the Parachute Factory, a collaboration between the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health (PRCH), the Community Services Network of Greater New Haven (CSN), and the Arts Council of Greater New Haven.
