When a couple lives in, around and through art, what happens when the life of one of the partners is threatened?

For the painter Jerry Kearns and the performer Nora York, who met in the art world and have been married since 1998, the answer was obvious: Put their heads together like Mickey and Judy and do a show.

When Ms. York, who has performed for decades at the Knitting Factory and the Public Theater, found out in May that she had cancer, she and Mr. Kearns, whose comics-inflected work often carries a real-world political weight, decided to transform an exhibition he was planning at the Mike Weiss Gallery in Chelsea into a forum about mortality, art and will. Based on Puccini's "Tosca," the show, "Diva's Song," which opens on Thursday, uses acrylic wall paintings of a larger-than-life- size femme fatale, Diva, and her gun-toting cowboy boyfriend, Sugar, to tell a noir- meets-O.K.-Corral story of a showdown with the Devil.

"Unlike Puccini's 'Tosca,' " an essay on the gallery's website explains, "the exhibition's narrative outcome is ultimately uncertain."

"Definitely, however," it adds, "the knife-wielding diva, in a stance reminiscent of Judith with the head of Holofernes, is the one in control."

In an interview, Ms. York - who interpreted the "Vissi d'arte" aria from "Tosca" in a show at the Public Theater in 2011 - described her illness as "this dilemma we have in our personal lives."

But she and Mr. Kearns said they wanted the show to be less about personal crisis than about art's existential power. "How do you confront this without making a one-woman show about illness, which I had absolutely no desire to do?" she said. (A website set up for the show, divas-song.com, puts the exhibition's images together with a recording of Ms. York and others interpreting the "Tosca" aria; Ms. York will also give a performance for the show at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater on July 29.)

Mr. Kearns said the hope was that the collaboration - whose images he and several former students have been creating directly on the gallery walls, to be painted over when the show ends on Aug. 22 - was something that "gets at notions of what art is actually for."

"At the heart of the work both of us do is storytelling," he added. "This is about the question, 'What do you do when you seem to stop passing through life and it turns around and comes at you like a runaway train?'"

Randy Kennedy