113Research

Joanna Black in COVID-19: Effects, Apathy and Betrayal,  views the ontological COVID-19 pandemic disruption of government protections through the lenses of commerce, work, leisure, histories, and political sites. Through this research creation project, she has been critically investigating the now long-standing impacts of COVID-19. By digitally manipulating photographic images, she captures people during the pandemic living their lives: at home, in public areas, at places of businesses, and in the institutional spaces they access. Runs Sept. 29 2025 - Jan. 26 2026. Image:  Touching Across Time, Joanna Black, 2025

    Curators: Ali Brown & Grace MacDonald.  Artists:  Kiley Brennan, Ali Brown, Angie Li, Bella Melardi, Parker Maycotte Rojas, Anastasia Vavaroutsos-Moffat. A s  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 ce...

Curated by Megh Dorward ... 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  Closing event  @ Tangled Arts +  Disability. Thursday April 10, 6PM, 401 Richmond Street, Suite 124. *Bring your own companion animal!   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    :  ...

  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  ...

Curatorial Team: Parwana Ayubi, Catherine Bradley, Madelaine Ella Daniels, Ella Gray, Farid Hjer, Rhi Hopperton, Pam Patterson, Ella Taylor, Yeokwang Yoon -- Ashlynn Doljac, 18" x 24"oils on canvas  -- Situated at 113Research , one of the three sites of the APRÈS QUOI festival, Medicine + Cabinet plays with the unique form of the vitrine gallery by asking artists to reimagine the space as a medicine cabinet for post-pandemic life. In exploring ideas of collection, hybridity, messiness, reconstruction, organic and inorganic forms,  Medicine + Cabinet  considers the changing patterns of care in the wake of major social and environmental change and aims to create a space of care and comfort.    The exhibiting artists depict community-centered healing, reflect on their personal practices of care, and imagine how these notions of healing and care can be extended to the environment around us and to our more-than-human kin.   Curators viewed submission...

  The Drawing Board is an artist-educator collective (Natalie Majaba Waldburger, Amy Swartz and JJ Lee) that performs methodological explorations at the intersections of labour, process and drawing. Our creative dialogue investigates the complexities of work contextualized by institutional structures. Our artworks examine the role of drawing through collaboration, mediated by the institution’s colonial legacies including race construction, gender identification and organizational hierarchies among human resources. The Drawing Board is a collective of Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCAD U) educators/creatives researching institutional structure through drawing as play methodology. We came together in response to curiosities and frustrations with the rigidity of the institutional structure within which we work. We use play and humour as tools for critique. One method we use is performance, structured like committee meetings, and our drawings emerge from satirical pla...

The recent regulated and confining pandemic years have operated to aggravate already existing anthropogenic anxieties. Climate change – oppressive unpredictable heat waves, uncontrolled forest fires, rising oceans levels – have had an impact on the race that both facilitated it and now roils from its effects. Aggressive urban sprawl bulldozes the land, and we search from among the rubble to find what of “land” remains. In Canada, the colonial project created divisiveness, poverty, and an early death for some, but also vast wealth and proprietorship for others. Can this unsettling situation be unraveled, or have we gone too far? Anxiety became an oft-experienced emotion in our classrooms – mostly online - at our universities over the last two years. A research team, here represented by Pam Patterson, OCAD University and Joanna Black, University of Manitoba, sought to explore generative potentials found in addressing anthropogenic and Covid-19 anxieties. We worked alongside our students ...

  Drawing on shared experience, artists Angie Ma, Vicky Talwar, and Siheng Wang in Navigating Belonging explore the complexities of racialized cultural identity through self-reflective creative practices. The individual works present a narrative viewing of the artists’ past and present experiences relating to immigration, belonging, and identity. Viewed dialogically, these artworks offer a framework for engaging with the entangled layers of cultural identity and intercultural relations. Also, as art educators, the artists consider how the application of creative storytelling in learning contexts can reveal and support the diverse experiences of students. Their uniquely critical and creative approaches can assist their students in acquiring deeper understandings of the complexities of their cultural identities. Navigating Belonging then becomes a representation of artistic process and acts as a visual manifestation of how art educators can contend with these “troubling issues”...

Alisa Oleva Port-to-Port , a project commissioned by Pier Projects focused in Felixstowe UK, presented a series of public art events inspired by walking in real-time and online. Multidisciplinary artist, Alisa Oleva was selected by a panel of residents and the resulting work included contributions by residents and others worldwide. To start, Alisa invited Felixstowe residents to describe local places that resonated with or held special memories for them. A map of personal landmarks was created that then shaped Alisa’s thinking and process. Inspired by the internationalism and dynamism of Felixstowe, as port, each of the descriptive writings collected locally was sent to someone living in a different port town. This person was invited to respond. This signaled a call for action that sparked a relay of transmitted memories and shaped an interconnected web among people living near and far. There were 25 exchanges across all corners of the globe, many of these featured “walks through sound...