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.

OCADU Fall Launch Press: Here

Exhibits:

Sites of Perception (video still) Pam Patterson

Video Link: Here

Opening Sept 16, 2024 - Jan 17,2025 
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 20 to April 13, 2025
nancy viva davis halifax
Curated by Megh Dorward 
constant   :   uncertainty

nancy halifax, a dream of becomin 

13.5" x 20"

(tri colour gum bichromate over cyanotype on Hanehumule Platinum rag)

Image Description: this is a colour print with a portrait orientation \ a black & white dog \ S \ a whippet is centred \ laying on a couch snuggled in blankets & pillows \ in the background there is a bookcase \ a light \ and a cup of tea

Artist Statement:

the works in constant    :    uncertainty are lyric constructions & continue my inquiry into the inequity of suffering while articulating the complexity of lives across the categories of human & the more-than-human \ they also indicate the connections of a particular relationship \ in acknowledging the difficult & at times the unbearable my relationship with S provides solace & supports the questions of how to contend with grief \ with loss \ indifference & cruelty \

crip arts attend to bodies within our earth \ world \ home \ as well as to the deconstruction of normative arts & relational practices \ as a crip \ slow & chronic artist my life is bound to bodies upon which worlds are built \ ordinary moments & gestures become the medium through which attunement to the materiality of bodies & partially shared worlds is accomplished

constant     :     uncertainty explores a small part of the intimacy & troubles of what it is to walk alongside another for over ten years \ you see there is a body conjoined with mine - S \ sometimes called medical device \ service dog  \ S is kin \ family \ a familiar \ with whom daily labours & delights are experienced \ S is not pet but companion in the alongside of feelingthinking \ these works are artifacts of our relationship depicting ordinary moments of our togethering & what connects us \ leash \ sock \ nest \ they do not breathe but attest to breathing done alongside

my love for dogs is enfolded into my need for a particular dog \ S is himself - luminous & compassionate \ who in being  himself is also symbolic of dogs constituted as service animals \ & dogs to live with \ our presence in the public world is as entanglement \ we are exceedingly other & our communication is subtle & uncertain \ curled lips \ flashes of teeth \ the height & angle of a tail \ splayed arms \ these gestures elicit the stilled nature of language \ the missing tongue of S

Curatorial Note:

nancy has a unique way of formatting text which becomes a stylistic element in her writing. I've taken a Mad-centred approach to co-curation with this show, which involved much dialoguing and thinking with the artist and a more conceptual approach to the didactic ... which is decidedly non-didactic and open to interpretation by the viewer .... 

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.

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 2024: 

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). 

Panel: Disability Aesthetics and Inclusive Pedagogy: Nov. 14, 2024  Pam Patterson (moderator)  Sean Lee, Mallory Tolcher, & OCAD Student Access & Accommodation with Chelsea Good.

Winter 2025: 

Feb 25 Talk/Workshop on Teams 12 noon (link): 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

March 25 Talk on Teams 12 noon (link): 

Jack Hawk: Disability Aesthetics in/for Community Tangled Arts & Disability 

Jack is the Outreach Coordinator for Tangled Arts + Disability facilitating partnering, outreach opportunities, and education/workshops for the gallery. They also curate the Vitrine Gallery at Tangled and is currently co-curator for the WBG at Gallery 1313 for a TAC-funded project Transformative Access : Activating Disability Desires. 

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 mail foci in her studies. 

Thursday, March 13, 6:30 p.m. Room 190, 100 McCaul Street: Grad Symposium Panel Talk: with Jose Miguel Esteban & Megh Dorward  

Join the Interdisciplinary Forum (Link for the presentation set up for you to use with the OCAD U CRIP Lab & DCCG members)

Speech-to-text will be visible on the screen (both accessible for Teams and live attendees)  & individual visual description and "conversational" support will be available on site.

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. 

nancy halifax exhibit and project closing event @ Tangled Arts + Disability. (date TBA) 

The idea for this event itself draws from the principles of creative access and conversational image description. Because not everyone will have seen the 113Research exhibit at OCAD, nancy will describe/conjure the content/context of the exhibition constant    :    uncertainty  for those gathered at Tangled. We will then lovingly describe (our) support animals to each other through both image description and poetry using the form of a brief ekphrastic poetry workshop.