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'sThe Artist is Nappingin the Window Box Gallery and Raudvee & Patterson's exhibitAlter(c)ationsin the Cell Gallery. This project also marks the culmination of the exhibit series by disability artists entitledThrough a Glass Lightly. All exhibits are at Gallery 1313.
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 deeply 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.
Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press.
ARTIFACTS gratefully acknowledges the Ontario Arts Council for its generous support of disability artists.
Window Box Gallery @ Gallery 1313, 1313 Queen Street West, June 1 - Sept. 2022 Josephine Guan is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher. She is interested in cultural understandings of health and disability and knowledge that stems from lived experience. She has recently extended that practice into documenting the lived experience of others through different modes of storytelling for awareness and change. Her work often takes form as multi-media and assemblage. This installation for the Window Box Gallery @1313 is part of a master’s research project (OCAD University) investigating the lived experience of acquired brain injury. My brain is sometimes leaky – sometimes foggy. That means constantly negotiating how much I do in a day. I survived my way through grad school propped up by the central premise of Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry: that rest is a tool for liberation and healing. I resist the urge to perform busyness and resist testing the limits of my body by napping. I ask f
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