Interview: Gabriela Mejia Talks About Her Plans for a New Book, Cleavage: New Ways To Look

Nikolai Hamel: Briefly, what is your project and what inspired it? How did you choose the name?

Gabriela Mejia: My project is to produce and curate a coffee table book called CLEAVAGE: New Ways to Look. It's a deliberately seductive art book, focused on edgy and provocative visual and textual representations of cleavage and breasts, as interpreted by its different artists and contributors; but more subtly, its primary objective is to raise awareness about breast cancer and early detection across a wider range of demographics.

It's a departure from traditional breast cancer awareness campaigns, which are usually more survivor-based and literal and grave in tone; and often they're designed exclusively for an audience of middle-aged or older women, thus marginalising young women and men. Additionally, it seeks to explore and promote alternative or auxiliary (non-invasive) breast cancer detection methods.

Rarely do we see more positive and creatively designed awareness and outreach programs, inclusive of all at-risk demographics. The exception to the rule would be an awareness project that uses the myriad tones of art -- from the profound to the humourous to the sensual to the abstract -- to engage the untapped population. This project seeks to be that exception.

I chose the name to entice readers to engage in the age-old taboo act of looking at breasts and cleavage. Its subtitle, New Ways to Look, refers both to the different depictions of the subject matter by its various contributors and the other detection methods it seeks to explore -- so it's a double entendre really.

NH: What do you hope to invoke in people when they see your book?

GM: I want to invoke awareness about the disease -- awareness amongst previously untapped demographics, so that preventative measures can be taken beforehand. Breast cancer is actually so common and deeply affects the men and women around those whom it strikes, yet I find that the traditional campaigns aren't very effective in conveying those very real statistics across the board, or how widely and profoundly the disease affects those who are even just around it (i.e. family, friends, etc.).

My mother died at 49 of breast cancer, and a first cousin (who survived) was diagnosed with it an even younger age -- yet despite my own strong family history of this disease, I took relatively little interest in it until I was thirty because the awareness campaigns out there just didn't speak to me. I suppose I knew I was at-risk, but it all still seemed so far removed because I, too, just tended to think of it as an exclusively middle-aged health threat. Furthermore, however, detection methods, such as mammograms, aren't often made available to women before the age of forty or even fifty, which is sad since breast cancer tends to be more aggressive in the younger women. There are alternative detection methods, such as breast thermography, though that are cheaper, less invasive and have a younger baseline screening age of twenty. And though far less common, men can also get breast cancer, and I don't think most people are aware of that.