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.
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.
OCADU Fall Launch Press: HereExhibits:
 |
| Sites of Perception (video still) Pam Patterson |
Video Link: HereOpening Sept 16-Jan 2025
Opening Reception September 30 4.30-6PM
Pam Patterson & Mel Rapp
Ocular Occurrences
Ocular Occurrences as exhibition, 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? Curated by Lauchlin
MacQuarrie, the exhibition explores tensions between visual distortion as
generative and desirable, and the medical mapping that seeks to contain and
define such distortion. 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.
Opening January 2025 nancy viva davis halifax
Curated by Megh Dorward
nancy halifax
born on the
North shore of New Brunswick on Mi'gma'gi territory \ they resides on unceded
territories on Wolostoqiyik lands \ they is a white, queer, mad, crip settler
entwined within the colonial & nation building project of canada while also
struggling hopefully towards decentring the normative
as a conceptual
artist working within the social fabric halifax’s crip praxis uses handwork as
a social practice & as a response to the pace of life ruled by extractive
politics \ current work queries
embodiment & modes of labour\ their
work has been published by arts \ literary & academic presses
Megh Dorward
Megh Dorward is
a Kjipuktuk (Halifax)-based, Mad-identifying artist-curator-researcher. They
hold an MA in Art Education and a BFA in Photography and Media Arts from NSCAD
University, having earlier begun their BFA in Painting at OCAD University. They
received the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) CGS Masters Award
for the pursuit of their graduate research.
Previously, Megh was Assistant
Director at Studio 21 Fine Art in Halifax for five years, then independently
represented a roster of Canadian artists online, curating pop-up exhibitions in
a variety of venues. They sat on NSCAD University’s Accessibility Committee,
numerous arts juries and boards, and have volunteered at not-for-profit
galleries including the Khyber Centre for the Arts, and Eyelevel Gallery in
Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Events:
Fall:
Workshop on Disability Aesthetics and Access Curation Oct 25 4-6PM with Pam Patterson (CRIP Lab), Hannah Dickson (OCAD Graduate Studies), Megh Dorward (NSCAD U), Cathy Cappon & Victoria Ho (ODESI), Jack Hawk (Tangled Arts & Disability), Grace MacDonald (Assistant Curator, 113Research), Mason Smart (Gallery 1313, Curator, Window Box Gallery). Teams Link Panel: Disability Aesthetics and Inclusive Pedagogy: Nov. 14, 2024 (on Teams Link) Pam Patterson (moderator) Mason Smart, Sean Lee, Mallory Tolcher, Chelsea Good. Winter 2025 Speakers (TBC):
nancy viva davis
halifax
remaking
the factory
within canada disability \ crip \ dada arts are
complex & spectacularly uneven in their locations & articulations \
always working under \ alongside or within normative art scenes \ as a crip
slow & chronic artist i am oriented differently - attending to the
materiality of bodys \ i propose to talk about past & current work inviting
audience support as i exhibit the limits of my embodiment with the intent to
redistribute & resituate normative & formal expectations \ this impulse
arises as most recently my praxis has been informed by chronic illness leaving
me working alongside rather than in community
Jose Miguel Esteban
Access as Fugitive Practice: Abolitionist Provocations
through Disability Arts and Culture
Disability is always playing, doing, being outside
normative exchanges of knowledge. As disability studies scholars we are tasked
with finding solutions that would ensure disability inclusion within the
university. Reflecting on my experiences as an instructor for an undergraduate
course on disability arts and culture, I explore the possibilities and limits
of fostering disability access within academic expectations of “success.”
Rather than encountering access as the solution for inclusion, I return to access
as a fugitive question—a critical and creative practice of navigating how to
live with, in, and as trouble to normative expectations of be(long)ing
within university spaces.
Megh Dorward
Activating Mad Art and Aesthetics: Conscious Co-curating
I will share my recent research Activating Mad Art and Aesthetics: Transcending the Biomedical Gaze illuminating the complex synergies and differences between Disability Studies and Mad Studies that I contend gives grounds for a uniquely Mad-centred approach to Mad Art and aesthetics. Touching on this current research, I build upon the aforementioned premise by developing a related methodology for equitably co-curating exhibitions with fellow Mad and disabled artists and curators. Conscious co-curating—as I’ve named this modality—foregrounds and holds space for collaborators’ experiential knowledge, while it incorporates Mad Studies, Disability Arts, queer, feminist, slow-, and care-based frameworks.
