2024-2025 Programming
WIAprojects will be working this year with CRIP Lab, 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 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?
The Window Box Gallery at Gallery 1313 is at sidewalk level and there is a ramp leading into the gallery, which has accessible washrooms, however the door to access them does not have a push button. The information around the artwork will be presented in large text, by QR code, and a recorded image description will be available on a recording device, along with a periscope to assist with viewing. The recorder and periscope may be acquired by taking an access passport to the person watching the gallery, with the recorder accessed by the passport in the container on top, and the periscope via the passport in the container on the bottom. There will be a change in the texture of the ground to indicate where the window and access passports are.
Image Description: Google link
Land Acknowledgment:
We want to acknowledge that we operate on unceded land that has been the home of Indigenous peoples and nations long before colonial documentation of time, specifically the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, the Wendat, and the Mississaugas of the Credit - people who continue to live and work here in what is currently known as Tkaronto, or Toronto. The land here, being connected through a winding family of waterways and lakes, has always been a gathering space for relation, ceremony and trade across nations. It remains home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples, as well as the meeting ground for the urban Indigenous and 2spirit Tkaronto community.
We want to ensure the work we do honors the original peoples of this land, and ensures the spirit of radical decolonialism throughout. Here in Tkaronto, we are covered under Treaty 13, and operate under the Dish with One Spoon Wampum belt. This is a treaty between the Haudenosaunee and the Anishinaabe, and a mutual agreement between nations for sharing land and resources, and that importantly, we all have a responsibility to care for this land and for those who live here. To honor both the past and living traditional caretakers of this land, we must take a firm stance towards Indigenous sovereignty.
Subsequent Indigenous peoples from around the world, as well as settlers, newcomers, folks who have been forced to relocate here as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and international forced labour trades, immigrants, refugees, and displaced people have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship, and respect.
It is up to all of us, settler and non-settler, to remain vigilant and understand the context in which we make a land acknowledgement in 2024. Acknowledgement does not provide absolution or absolvement from the past or the current. When discussing disability, we must realize we are living through a mass disabling event that disproportionately affects the marginalized. Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island are actively facing violence, trauma and wrongful imprisonment of water protectors, face continued ramifications from nuclear waste sites adjacent to indigenous territories, and have also faced the brunt of COVID-19, receiving unsatisfactory governmental aid despite actively sharing vaccination resources with settler communities. It has never been more important to support indigenous peoples in the arts; to be aware of the oppressive weights but also platform the joys and relations reclaimed, despite continuing acts of institutional violence.
Colonization is actively happening around us, both here and in the global sphere. We cannot be in this moment without addressing the unacceptable violence occurring in Palestine, or how the arts world benefits from it. As workers in the arts, we encourage you to get involved with local organizations, such as No Arms in the Arts, to speak out and encourage organizations using banks such as Scotiabank for funding to divest and defund. Art institutions cannot become complacent in the face of funding. We cannot “crip” without remaining in conversation with the complex concept of decolonization.
Curatorial Essay
by Mason
Smart
Throughout Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires, Harmeet Rehal, Sunshine Torme Johnson, and Hollis McConkey share visions of magnificence, through process and product. Writer and educator Mia Mingus describes the magnificence of the disabled body-mind, separating this quality from a conception of beauty bound up in adherence to abled, white supremacist bodily norms.
Mingus elaborates through examples:
“...The magnificence of a body that shakes, spills out, takes up space, needs help, moseys, slinks, limps, drools, rocks, curls over on itself. The magnificence of a body that doesn’t get to choose when to go to the bathroom, let alone which bathroom to use. A body that doesn’t get to choose what to wear in the morning, what hairstyle to sport, how they’re going to move or stand, or what time they’re going to bed.” (2021)
Her concept could be understood as the recognition and appreciation in others of manifestations of being born into meaning through struggle.
☆
Something I’ve learned this summer is that rules and norms serve to control and manage large groups of people, but on the individual, interpersonal scale, rules can be bent according to the risk associated with bending them and the readiness of the individuals involved to meet that risk. Both as a camp counselor and curator, flexibility and patience have allowed me to figure out how to bend these rules—whether rules about making noise during a presentation, or around hard deadlines—in a way that allows a sense of freedom in the interactions between myself and those involved in a project.
This reflection brings me to the idea of access intimacy, coined by writer and educator Mia Mingus and described by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in a conversation with Stacey Park Milbern as a facet of crip wealth: the bounty of knowledge that the disabled experience affords and the gift of being witnessed and cared for, or given the space to experience the fullness of their disabled experience by other disabled people, namely around access needs. Piepzna-Samarasinha notes that this intimacy can be cultivated through a practice of noticing, respectful inquiry and valuing of disabled knowledges. (2024)
Harmeet Rehal’s ਪੀੜੀ/Pidi as grounding (ਮੰਜਾ/Manjas as Mobility Aids), 2023, is an example of this witnessing in action. Rehal responds to an access need they’ve identified through creation of an intervention that is not just practical, but a bright intervention in space due to the presence of the disabled person who requires and uses it. Because of the creativity engendered by an experience of disability, a new option for reuse of milk crates and fabric becomes possible, and the reality of the diversity of disabled experiences and lineages can be made visible in abled spaces that may also be monocultural.
Piepzna-Samarasinha names the ability to “expand” in their reflection on crip wealth. This permission to take up space is mobilized by the brightness of the Pidi, and their conspicuous ethic of reuse. as well as their ability to be connected into a larger seating area. The design refuses the extractive colonial norm that would see disability marginalized due to how it makes clear the necessity of being witnessed, and the corresponding care that would contravene extractive ethics that see productivity as a body’s main function.
The labour performed by disabled people is often undervalued. Rehal’s work also puts a fine point on valuing labour that has been distanced from its product, namely that put into creating the sari fabric and milk crate, by giving them a new life. Labour can be understood in relation to disability as ‘effort’ or energy expended for a purpose, as opposed to its meaning in relation to productivity, where energy is expended to meet a certain goal. That energy is only seen as valuable if it meets that goal. Labour through this lens of “Energy expended for a purpose” is not tied to accomplishment, but rather to the motions of living with a disability. When grounded through a lens of crip wealth that prizes the wisdom of these experiences, the actions of living can be holistically valued outside of productivity value.
Hollis McConkey’s work further considers the labour performed by people with disabilities. Her work, in-progress at the time of writing, will meditate on the labour of being stuck in a loop of skin picking. Energy here is expended through emotions like frustration, through the space it holds for creativity, and through the physical act of skin picking. A disability-informed perspective on labour does not put a value on expending energy for a use that is not explicitly productive. Rather, it radically and neutrally accepts the continuum of purposes for which energy can be spent. Honouring McConkey’s production time is another access intervention, allowing the artist to have the time and space outside of abled constructs of acceptable timelines to create work, something enabled by remaining in conversation with the artists to make space for accommodation. The rebellious quality of eschewing external time frames deepens the disruptive power of disability art, and its resistence to forms of productivity that require extraction of energy rather than it being given freely with full consent of its boundaries.
Sunshine Torme Johnson’s work, Home to Heal, 2023, emphasizes the necessity of accessible housing to support the wellbeing of people with disabilities. Johnson writes,
"Home To Heal" captures a profound moment of ancestral
spiritual practice, illustrating the power of manifestation in a form of
Afro-Caribbean spirituality. The image depicts a ritual where individuals
inscribe their deepest intentions onto a bay leaf with a marker, igniting it to
invoke the assistance of spirits in realizing these desires.
For me, this ritual held
profound significance during a period of housing instability, marked by a
relentless cycle of couch-surfing among friends and strangers. Struggling to
meet basic physical needs, I found traditional Western psychology lacking in addressing
the core issue of stable housing. Despite the well-meaning efforts of
counselors, their support often felt inadequate, offering little more than what
felt like meaningless affirmations and coping strategies that were inaccessible
given my circumstances.
What
I truly required, and still do, is a place of refuge—a sanctuary where I can
store food, belongings, and find solace in a bed of my own. Beyond mere
shelter, this entails a space that ensures both emotional and physical safety,
providing the stability essential for healing.
In "Home To Heal," I captured a pivotal moment of hope and resilience, as I boldly claimed the necessity of stable housing to navigate the mental and physical perils of homelessness. This photograph encapsulates a journey towards survival, where the act of manifestation becomes a beacon of healing amidst adversity. (Johnson)
Johnson connects spirituality to resistance and sees it as a strategy for accessing and maintaining wellbeing outside of often inaccessible Western wellness models in his digital illustration Water Being, 2023. He describes the healing power of the water to transform the psyche and the duality of its healing property and awareness of the colonial violence that makes Lake Ontario accessible to the present-day people of Toronto. The fantastical form of the Water Being and its transness evoke the body’s mutability, and ground that in the water as a natural form that is ontologically mutable, and forces beings to work with this unchanging quality. This can serve as a one of many conceptual grounds for disability pride as well as a challenge for settlers to re-create intimate and holistic connections with the land and water to ensure their survival; the learnings, such as the importance of awareness and reciprocity, from creating these connections with ever-changing entities can promote disabled wellbeing. Johnson’s holistic approach channels magnificence in its expansive connection of Land and Water to his experience of disability, invoking interconnected struggle and the range of autonomies that are present within the natural world.
Rehal, McConkey, and Johnson meet the question, “what can disability do to…?”, as asked by Day Heisinger-Nixon, filling in that final blank with propositions for labour, sustainability, relationships and decolonial action.
Works Cited
Johnson., S. T. (2024). Unpublished artist statement.
Mingus, M. (2021). Moving Toward the Ugly: A Politic Beyond Desirability. Femmes Of Color
Symposium Keynote Speech, (8/21/11). https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/moving-toward-the-ugly-a-politic-beyond-desirability/
Piepzna-Samarasinha. L., in “Crip Lineages, Crip Futures: A Conversation by Stacey Park
Milbern and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha” in Crip Genealogies, 2024. Edited by M. Y. Chen, A. Kafer, E. Kim, and J. A. Minich. Duke University Press.
Artist Bios:
Harmeet Rehal as a fat, trans, Disabled,
Sikh-Panjabi multidisciplinary artist, educator, and organizer, uses
illustration, collage, painting, and textile arts and facilitates related
community arts programming. Their art research and practices address: pandemic
care networks, intergenerational crip archives, hacking normative design, and
Panjabi survivor-hood.
https://harmeet-rehal.com/pages/about-me
Sunshine Torme Johnson is a dynamic facilitator, artist, and community member. A Black, disabled, gender-diverse, and queer individual, he embraces his fluidity through his art. Sunshine creates transformative pieces using multiple mediums including digital illustration, photography, videography, collaging and crafting. https://www.instagram.com/transcending_sunshine?igsh=cDc1N3VmNndybHZ2
Hollis McConkey addresses time and space
through personal perspectives and a critique of ableist structures. She
foregrounds this using her disabled body/mind, with media such as video,
painting, collage, photography, and experimental animation.
https://hollismcconkey.format.com
Curators Bios:
Jack Hawk (he/him) is an arts worker, consultant, curator, and astrologer, whose practices of activism, arts work, and divination are rooted in decolonial disruption, disability justice, and queer liberation. He operates from a place Donna J. Harraway describes as "staying in the trouble"—building provocative futures within the troubled waters of the present. Currently, Jack works at Tangled Art + Disability as Outreach Coordinator; he curates Tangled’s vitrine exhibition space, and has led several large-scale projects to connect and support artists and arts practitioners. He is also a leading relaxed performance consultant, counting the Stratford Festival, Grand Theatre, Buddies in Bad Times, and Tarragon Theatre among his many clients. Hand-in-hand with his work in activism and the arts, Jack has been a practicing astrologer for eight years, of which he has derived much of his praxis from his long-term mentor Julia Wawrzyniak-Beyer.
Mason Smart (he/him) is a support worker, emerging curator and
critic and who recently curated the Window Box Gallery at Gallery 1313 (Dimensions
of Toronto: Looking Otherwise with Nature from March-April 2023 and Transformative
Access September-January 2024/25). He has been published by the OCAD Arts
and Science Journal and online with C Magazine. He is interested in exploring
ways that art can inform, influence and prototype thinking and systems that
centre and are underpinned by holistic praxes of care.
Sept 2024 to January 2025, Ocular Occurrences.
Pam Patterson & Mel Rapp
Ocular Occurrences
Ocular Occurrences as exhibition, displays, in the vitrines, digital colour prints (that use eye scans, photographs, and topographical maps) overlayed with Amsler grids, designed to engage the viewer with how Patterson sees and processes images. What, she asks, is the disconnect between medical models and subjective experience? What can a body do to…? The seeming ineffectiveness of this exercise in locating sight is expressed in the accompanying video, Sites of Perception.
Optician, designer and writer Mel Rapp exercises his theory of the intersection of observation, memory, and language by responding, in the vitrine, in writing to Patterson’s ironic images. In the two facing photos in the annex lounge, one sees closeup Patterson’s eye framed by one of Rapp’s iconic glassware designs.
Here futility
is recovered, redesigned, and transformed.
Sites of Perception - Video: LINK
Videography: Hri Neil
Editing: Hri Neil & Sissie He
Still Photo: John Oughton
Music: Tomas Del Balso
Artist Bios:
Pam Patterson’s research, performance and art practice have focussed on embodiment, disability, identity politics, and trauma. She teaches at OCAD University in the Faculty of Art, is a Research Fellow at NSCAD University in the Master’s in Art Education Program, was on the Board Of Directors for A Space Gallery, and was a founding member of the editorial board for MATRIARTS: A Canadian Feminist Art Journal.
As a
performance and visual artist, she has exhibited and performed across Canada
and internationally, solo and with Leena Raudvee as ARTIFACTS. Pre-pandemic,
she was invited to participate in residencies in France and Ireland. Recent
exhibitions address intergenerational trauma, disability, memory, and language
in the Irish/Canadian immigrant body. In digital photo collage, drawing, video,
and performance, she plays with quirky concepts and images that have emerged
due to a recent traumatic brain injury and her changing vision.
Patterson
identifies, in practice, with the idea of “crip horizons” as a radical
reimagining for/in cultural practice. “Crip horizons” calls for a renewing of
“crip” language as/in visual representation. In taking this on in practice, she
revels in, and simultaneously pushes against, how and what she “sees”.
Often bodies,
she notes, such as hers, marked by disability, are said to hold no future: they
are empty vessels from which ableism insidiously pushes its agenda. Her future
though is adroitly written on her body. Her disability becomes not only imbued
with possibility, but with transformative meaning, value, and desirability.
Mel Rapp is a licensed optician and eyewear designer located in Toronto Canada. Having studied optics, jewellery fabrication, tool and die, woodworking, bookbinding, the accordion, and created a curated museum and exhibition of the genre of the cat eye design in eyewear, he devotes his life to the question of how existence and creativity are linked. His soon-to-be-released book on art informs the audience that they too have license and are instrumental in the creative dynamic between artist-art-audience.
