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.
113Research, 113 McCaul Street (back of the Grange Food Court) , 5th floor
Fall: Sept 16- Jan 2025.
Pam Patterson & Mel Rapp
Ocular Occurrences
Thanks to the Ontario Art's Council for funding support for this exhibition.
Winter: Jan - April 2025.
January 20 to April 13, 2025
nancy viva davis halifax
Curated by Megh Dorward
constant : uncertainty
Spring: April 2025- Sept 2025
Group Student Exhibit
Curated by Ali Brown and Grace Macdonald
Project Events OCAD University:
Fall 2024:Panel: Nov 14 12-2 PM, Disability Aesthetics and Inclusive Pedagogy: Pam Patterson (moderator), Sean Lee, Mallory Tolcher.
Winter 2025:
Feb 25 Talk/Workshop on Teams 12 noon: nancy viva davis halifax (link)
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
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.
Join the Interdisciplinary Forum
Link for the presentation set up for you to use with the OCAD U CRIP Lab & DCCG members.
Jose Miguel Esteban
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.
Gallery 1313, Window Box Gallery
Curated by Mason Smart and Jack Hawk
Sept 1, 2024: Harmeet Rehal’s Manjas as Mobility Aids, 2023,
Dec 1, 2024: Sunshine Torme Johnson's Home to Heal
March 2025: Hollis McConkey
For more information: https://wiaprojects.blogspot.com/p/2024-2024-programming.html
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