WIAprojects

Harmeet Rehal’s  Manjas as Mobility Aids, 2023, curated by Mason Smart and Jack Hawk, will run from September 1st 2024-October 30th 2024 at Gallery 1313, 1313 Queen Street West, Toronto.  The Window Box Gallery will be visible from 1pm-5pm Wednesday through Saturday, and from 1pm-4pm on Sundays. A community opening event will take place on September 3rd from 6:30-8:30, at Gallery 1313. All are welcome, and Rehal’s Manjas will be in action at this event.

For this year WIAprojects  will be working with   113Research   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

  Dimensions of Toronto: Looking Otherwise with Nature March - April 2023 The Window Box Gallery at Gallery 1313 Artists: Iris Adrienne Langlois, Liz DeCoste, and Abby Kettner Curator: Mason Smart --- Within  Dimensions of Toronto: Looking Otherwise with Nature , many of the pieces are  ephemeral in a sense, especially pointed to through their translucency. There is a unity of mid-being  broken by the instances of opaque metal. Oscillating visually on the border of being  solid, made separate by glass, floating: this is a possibility. This is a foreign yet familiar world,  making the viewer a visitor in their own habitual “Toronto-space”, here made alien, made soft  and precarious. Ephemera can be a counterpart to the literal and figurative concrete. As part of her series City Skins (2023-ongoing), Abby Kettner's latex casts respond to  the symbols made manifest in Toronto’s infrastructure by isolating and manipulating them. In this  process, she spotlights the sense of collective

Exercising Urbanism is a collaboration in urban exploration with local emerging artists and designers Ella Hough and Maya Freeman. Freeman and Hough will lead three drawing workshops in the city (at set locations in Parkdale, Cabbagetown, and Chinatown) that aim to help us re-examine the city critically, imaginatively, and playfully. The drawings that develop from the workshops will make up the installation of the Window Box Gallery. With each subsequent workshop, drawings will become layered in the window box as the experiences of the city’s secret corners and alleyways are reimagined as hubs for creative expression and informal gathering.  Participation in the workshops is free (pre-registration required) and materials will be supplied. To register, please email: exercisingurbanism@gmail.com. Artists Maya Freeman is a designer based in Toronto, Canada. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Toronto in 2021. Maya is motivated by the possibilities that

In exploring the demarcation of exoticism and otherness in international food aisles,  Grocery  interjects sculpted replicas of cultural foods into their broader corresponding food categories. Photographed   in   Walmart   grocery   aisles,   Lu   deconstructs   habitual   exotification   by   asserting   that sesame oil is oil, black rice vinegar is vinegar, and shrimp chips are chips. The disruption of imposed otherness re-envisions the potential of cultural foods in building, diversifying, and nourishing communities. Bridget Lu/  晓茶  is a Chinese-Canadian artist, science enthusiast, and aspiring medical illustrator. Her practice includes painting, sculpture, printmaking, and digital media— often taking   form   in   multi-media   works. Lu   explores   and   integrates   cultural   identity,   design   practices and biological concepts— currently focusing on the generational loss of culture through diasporic migration and the use of everyday scenes and objects. Curated by: Ella Tay

ARTIFACTS (Pam Patterson & Leena Raudvee) with Josephine Guan, Sean Lee (Tangled Arts & Disability),  WIAprojects, and Gallery 1313. have been engaged this summer in the Alter(c)ations Project. This has included Josephine Guan's   The Artist is Napping   in the Window Box Gallery and Raudvee & Patterson's exhibit   Alter(c)ations   in the Cell Gallery. This project also marks the culmination of the exhibit series by disability artists entitled   Through a Glass Lightly . All exhibits are at Gallery 1313. Alter©ations , as exhibition, illuminates a companionship in which there is a search for knowledge not only of the much-loved other but of the social milieu each inhabits. This complex pairing of feminist disability artists leads to the inevitable – though in our case, rare, after 40 years of collaboration – moments of disagreements. But these often spark longer conversations and a deeper understanding. As Donna Haraway (2003) so rightly asserts, “‘communication’” a