The Alter(c)ations Project

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’” across irreducible difference is what matters” (p. 48). It is profoundly pleasurable, even joyful, and acknowledges a deepening respect.

While the pandemic detached us from each other and our communities, and exacerbated our physical, emotional and/or mental conditions by its isolationism, we dug in and worked, and now scrabble back. We have been deep inside our skins navigating within our closed circles, drawing out how we present (in) our distinctive worlds.

By reinvigorating the activity of drawing, our hands lovingly trace our body-minds, and indirectly each other’s, articulating alterations that are stunningly striated or swirled, unbalanced, and/or askew. We perceive our own body-selves as other and articulate these in relation to each other.

This is a personal and yet socio-political enterprise for in our doing, we mirror others’ “doings” in the larger disability arts community that likewise ripple out and necessitate respect.

The Alter(c)ations Project Collective:

A selection of Patterson’s and Raudvee’s framed drawings or drawing-related works sat alongside a collective text-based wall-sized collage composed of individual words or phrases on paper by members of the disability arts community. A call was sent out by Tangled Arts & Disability for contributions to this project. Gallery visitors assisted in placing these collective words on the wall in performance on Saturday, August 6, 2-4 PM.

Elaine Stewart
Contributing artist to Through a Glass Lightly & The Alter(c)ations Project collective text work.

The Alter(c)ations Project: WE CAN WORKSHOP

You’re invited to the We CAN Workshop: A Disability Arts Pandemic Debrief & Call to Action! August 11th, 7:00pm – 8.30 PM EST on Zoom. 

Many of us in the disability arts community have been unbalanced by this pandemic. This has generated moments where we have felt fragile, uncertain, and vulnerable. Spaces have opened – and closed. The ‘tide’ now recedes, and we are, individually and collectively, presented with a time to debrief and witness how we now present in our diverse worlds. What are the potentials/realities here? How has, or will this time affect our ideas, images, and strategies for practice? How (well) can we now access each other and the ‘gallery’?

This event is a conversation between Sean Lee (Tangled Arts & Disability), Josephine Guan, Pam Patterson & Leena Raudvee (ARTIFACTS & WIAprojects), and you – the attendees. We invite the community to come and ‘workshop’ with us as we contemplate the implications of this post-pandemic time. Come ready to listen, share, reflect, grieve, laugh, and imagine.

Accessibility: ASL will be provided by Jo-Ann Martin and Kimberley Johnson. Auto-captioning will be provided. 

Co-presented by Tangled Art + Disability and WIA Projects.

Description for main event image: Photographic work by Pam Patterson. Two images of feet read from left to right. The images shift from a distinct image of paired feet – white skin on blue-black asphalt – to an abstract effervescence of browns and golds as the imaged feet dissolve and disperse in water.

Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press.

ARTIFACTS gratefully acknowledges the Ontario Arts Council for its generous support of disability artists.