Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires

For this year CRIP Lab will be working with WIAprojects,   113Research   and   Gallery 1313   on a Toronto Arts Council funded project,   Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires .

Harmeet Rehal, Manjas as Mobility Aids, 2023

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?

OCAD Fall Events Launch Press: Here

Project Launch: Sept 3, 6.30PM - 8.30 PM Gallery 1313.

Link to Gallery 1313 Programming and more Here

Exhibits & Events:

113Research, 113 McCaul Street (back of the Grange Food Court) , 5th floor

Fall: Sept 16- Jan 2025. Reception: Sept 30. 4.30-6PM

Pam Patterson & Mel Rapp in Ocular Occurrences

Thanks to the Ontario Art's Council for funding support for this exhibition.

Winter: Jan - April 2025. nancy halifax curated by Megh Dorward

Upcoming Events OCAD University:

Fall 

Workshop: Oct 25, 4-6 PM, Disability  Aesthetics and Access Curation with Pam Patterson (CRIP Lab), 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: Nov 14 12-2 PM, Disability Aesthetics and Inclusive Pedagogy: Pam Patterson (moderator), Sean Lee, Mallory Tolcher. Teams Link.

Winter 
Public Talks TBC with Megh Dorward, nancy halifax, & Miguel (Miggy) Jose Esteban.

Gallery 1313:

Exhibition Opening Sept 1, 2024: Harmeet Rehal’s Manjas as Mobility Aids, 2023, curated by Mason Smart and Jack Hawk, will run to November 30th 2024.