113Research

  Ocular Occurrences opens Sept 16 and runs until Jan 17 2025. Exhibit reception is Sept 30, 4.30 -6 PM. In exhibition, Patterson displays, in the vitrines, digital colour prints (that use eye scans, photographs, and topographical maps) overlayed with Amsler grids, designed to engage the viewer with how Patterson sees and processes images. What, she asks, is the disconnect between medical models and subjective experience? What can a body do to…? The seeming ineffectiveness of this exercise in locating sight is expressed in the accompanying video, Sites of Perception. Optician, designer and writer Mel Rapp exercises his theory of the intersection of observation, memory, and language by responding, in the vitrine, in writing to Patterson’s ironic images. In the two facing photos in the annex lounge, one sees closeup Patterson’s eye framed by one of Rapp’s iconic glassware designs.  Here futility is recovered, redesigned, and transformed. Transformative Access: Activating Disabil...

For 2024-2025 113 Research will be working with WIAprojects   and   Gallery 1313   on a Toronto Arts Council funded project,   Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires . In “Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires”, the “disabled” bodies we inhabit foreground our concerns as we, emerging and established artists/designers, curators, project leaders, and advisors, take on critical exploratory work. Here the thematic, creative forms, and community practices are embodied with our pain, frustration, confusions, limitations, desires, loves and cares. As “disabled” people, our bodies exist in tension with the normalized expectations of ordered bodies. In "Transformative Access," we examine how our bodies’ experiences remake our worlds. In conversation with ideologies, people, policies, and structures, we ask, how can the "crip" body act, given its creative potential, be centred in these practices, and be resilient to ableism. We ask, “What can a bo...

  In Vitrine, Annex Lounge, and Video Galleries work by  Sissie He, Jordan King, Billie MacFarland, Rae Sigrist and Kiley Brennan.   In To Perform, We Perform we draw our curatorial premise from Judith Butler's 1988 text Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Butler here offers insight into how one might "trouble gender". This exhibit poses the promise of how potential performative deviations – relating to gender and elsewhere - however slight, could affect social and cultural change.  We invited artists to consider how the (re)performance of transgressions - in a range of mediums - might have an impact on affecting new perceptions of (dis)ability, materiality, gender, sustainability, and even survival.  Photograph:  Ephemeral Pops by  Sissy He.  

 Vincent Depoivre, Boy Toys, opening March 1 2024 in the vitrine and lounge galley spaces until April 30. In Boy Toys , Vincent Depoivre reflects on masculine tropes using the form of children's toys. These LEGO pieces feature rounded edges, lack defining characteristics, and are made of plastic—there is nothing inherently sexual about them. Choosing these figures to act as signifiers of what we perceive as making the masculine form sexual challenges the viewer to reconsider their own perceptions of sexuality. Vincent Depoivre is a French artist and designer, and Director of Maison Depoivre Art Gallery in Prince Edward County. Image:  VINCENT DEPOIVRE ,  Am i a Unicorn?, 2021,  Aluminum dibond print, ( 40” x 52” x 1″)

  Catherine Heard’s exhibition  Making  ––  Redwork: The Emperor of Atlantis   employs the creative form of the graphic novel to reflect on the five-year process of creating a community-based textile installation.  Her narrative emphasizes subjectivity, revealing the complexities, uncertainties, and anxieties of producing a work of art.  The installation, which is on view at the Niagara Artist Centre in Fall 2023, camouflages scenes of war, injustice, and resistance in a patchwork of antique redwork embroideries.  The complex work integrates embroidery patterns depicting WWI, WW2, The Vietnam War, The War on Terror, Black Lives Matter, and the current war in Ukraine. FREE ONSITE WORKSHOP & ARTIST TALK on Oct 25, OCAD University, 100 McCaul Street, 3rd Floor, Room 316, 12 - 3 PM. All supplies provided and all are welcome! 

  In Phases (In and Out) , Hollis McConkey speaks indirectly to her own disabilities by addressing her sister’s lived disability experience. Hollis invited her sister Charlotte to write down her feelings and struggles in living daily with a painful disability. This resultant collection – scraps of paper, napkins, and wrappers – exposes the viewer to the consistent and exhausting nature of surviving with certain disabilities. In addition, Hollis unpacks the TTC’s accessibility poster campaign. Despite appearing in street cars, buses, and subway trains across the city, the TTC’s poster is often passed over and misunderstood by travellers in the rush of commuting The resulting dissonance between the TTC’s ineffective poster campaign and Hollis’ sister’s visceral writing opens the viewer to questioning how a lack of visibility further disables people with invisible disabilities. In this, Hollis emphasizes the continuous marginalization of invisible disabilities. More information  ...