2024-2025 Projects
For this 2024-2025 year 113Research will be working with CRIP Lab, WIAprojects and Gallery 1313 on a Toronto Arts Council funded project, Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires.
Introduction
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 body do...?” But then further expand this to, “What can a body do to… “? What can a body do to architectural structures, institutional expectations, medical practices, and to the very conditions that first created inaccessibility? What can a body do to realize its desires for liberatory and intimate access, to press itself, in Czech feminist Katerina Kolarova’s words, to imagine “crip horizons” — alternative possibilities in which disability can be desirable, and the structures surrounding it, profoundly contested?
Project Venues
Two exhibition series are planned from September 1, 2024 to May 1, 2025 at 113Research, OCAD U, and in the Window Box Gallery, Gallery 1313. There will be two exhibits, each three months long for fall and winter, at 113Research, and four two-month exhibits at the Window Box Gallery.Window Box Gallery exhibits, essay, and programming: Here
113Research includes a four-windowed shallow vitrine gallery, an adjacent wall-mounted video screen, and a lounge area annex. The Window Box Gallery (measuring 66” H x 25” W) is located in the courtyard outside Gallery 1313’s entrance.
113Research is an independent non-university-funded gallery at OCAD U. As research-creation exhibition/project space, it poses questions that foreground practices, collaboration, and institutional growth and change. It welcomes evocative and provocative projects that generate a frisson between the institution and its public.
The Window Box Gallery, as a streetside window space, facilitates the production of innovative work by emerging and established artists and designers alike, on projects that surpass physical exhibition confines.
While these gallery spaces speak to very different communities and audiences,
many similarities link them in this project in conversation and exchange. Both
occupy window spaces -- liminal zones -- between the formal gallery and
community. Given this, each invites a passerby’s unintentional viewing and
further engagement through community outreach and programming.
Exhibits:
Opening Sept 16, 2024 - Jan 17,2025
Opening Reception September 30 4.30-6PM
Pam Patterson & Mel Rapp
Ocular Occurrences
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.
Opening January 20 to April 13, 2025
nancy viva davis halifax
Curated by Megh Dorward
constant : uncertainty
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It honors nancy's perspective regarding how art/text ought to be a subjective experience, rather than spelled out for the viewer. It is a much more personal approach to use the artist statement as the didactic, in line with survivor research methodology ... and it becomes an extension of the work itself.
The artwork will be hung at "S-height" - a concept I suggested to nancy - which she was happy with and it makes a statement in and of itself. This approach prioritizes our “more-than-human” friends and accessibility and embodies a disability arts approach. An homage to service animals, hanging the work at S-height comments on the complexities of normative society that both disabled/Mad folx and their service animals are forced to navigate in order to survive - most often a world that is not built for them.
Megh Dorward
Yes, And…
April 14, 2025 – Sept 27, 2025
Curators: Ali Brown & Grace MacDonald
Artists: Kiley Brennan, Ali Brown, Angie Li, Bella Melardi, Parker Maycotte Rojas, Anastasia Vavaroutsos-Moffat.
As student artists and curators with disabilities we dream of environments where we can thrive in our practices celebrating the fullness of our identities without compromising our bodies and minds. Here we disrupt a limited perception of disability by highlighting the breadth of our experiences. We celebrate the complexity of who we are, not just as disabled individuals navigating our way through inaccessible systems, but as artists, creators, and thinkers. We recognize the need, and pave way for, curatorial practices in which our art-work and body-work is valid, valuable, and appreciated for its artistic merit and its innovation from proposal to installation.
“Yes, And…” features work from OCAD U students from the Disability Community & Culture Group (DCCG), a space for students to explore and celebrate disability identity through participating in social activities, advocacy, and exhibition opportunities. If you would like to join, email Ali at dccg.group@gmail.com
Fall 2024:
Winter 2025:
March 25 Talk on Teams 12 noon:
Pam Patterson: Activating Disability Desires
Pam Patterson has had an active and varied career in the arts. Her research, performance, visual work, curating, and teaching have focused on embodiment in art practice, the “body” or haptic in art, women and health, disability, women’s studies and art education. She is currently Assistant Professor Cross Disciplinary Arts (Art & Design Education), Co-Leader Creative Research Inclusive Practices (CRIP) Lab, and Artistic Director 113Research Project Gallery at OCAD U, and research fellow Art Education, NSCAD. She is Director for the TAC-funded research creation project Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires presenting exhibitions and events at 113Research,.OCAD U, Gallery 1313, and Tangled Arts + Disability. As a queer disability artist, Patterson has exhibited and performed across Canada and internationally.
Ali Brown & Grace MacDonald, Curators for 113Research OCAD U: Accessibility in Student Curatorial Projects
Ali Brown is an artist living and working in Mississauga, Ontario. A current Drawing & Painting BFA student at OCAD University, Brown collaborates with personal archives, memory (or lack thereof), and nostalgic imagery to create work that engages both the mind and body of her and her audience’s inner child. Beyond her studio practice, Brown is interested in and actively involved with arts education and disability arts communities within the university, receiving the Diversity & Equity Excellence student award for her ongoing advocacy.
Grace MacDonald is a third year Criticism and Curatorial Practices student, a member of CRIP Lab, and the lead curator for 113Research. She has a personal interest in accessibility in the arts, working with and understanding the experiences of people and artists with disabilities. She hopes to make accessibility in the arts one of her main foci in her studies.
Thursday, March 13, 6:30 p.m. Room 322, 230 Richmond Street: Grad Symposium Panel Talk: with Jose Miguel Esteban & Megh Dorward
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Photo by John Oughton |
Jose Miguel Esteban
Access as Fugitive Practice: Abolitionist Provocations
through Disability Arts and Culture
Activating Mad Art and Aesthetics: Conscious Co-curating
nancy halifax exhibit and project closing event @ Tangled Arts + Disability. Thursday April 10, 6PM, 401 Richmond Street, Suite 124. *Bring your own companion animal!