Access Visual Art

06/02/2020

11/20/2019

Great workshop this past weekend on experimental audio description at Critical Distance with Kat Germain and Aislinn Thomas, pictured here with Sean Lee of Tangled Art + Disability in front of an artwork from Koffler Centre of the Arts exhibition UNDOMESTICATED.

11/07/2019

Sneak peak at Valentin Brown’s show “Body Farm” opening Friday November 8, 6-8pm at Tangled Art Gallery Toronto. Tangled Art + Disability

10/27/2019

1197 signatures are still needed!

09/28/2019

ACCESS IS LOVE and LOVE IS COMPLICATED opens October 3 at Critical Distance in Toronto!

Critical Distance and Tangled Art+Disability are pleased to present ACCESS IS LOVE and LOVE IS COMPLICATED, an exhibition and event series featuring Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Kat Germain, Wy Joung Kou, Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning, Andy Slater, Elizabeth Sweeney, Aislinn Thomas, and Adam Wolfond and Estée Klar.

This program is co-curated by CDCC Education and Accessibility Coordinator, Emily Cook, and Tangled Art + Disability Director of Programming, Sean Lee and represents the next level in our ongoing series of programs providing opportunities for curators and artists to consider new and more collaborative aesthetic and conceptual approaches to accessibility within and beyond the gallery context.

ACCESS IS LOVE and LOVE IS COMPLICATED takes inspiration not only from disability activist Mia Mingus’ idea that accessibility should be understood as an act of love, but riffs on a pop cultural understanding that love is complicated—and thus, if we truly wish to move towards an accessible future then we must embrace the frictions of it. A lived experience that is often as political as it is relational, disability is a springboard from which access is entangled in the political alterities of our bodies; how they move, navigate and shape the world.

We–disabled people–are, as Kelly Fritsch notes, effective agents of world building and dismantling towards more just relations. But as we dismantle the world and work towards access as an act of love, we must also recognize that this act is complicated. Crip, Mad, Spoonie, and Deaf people are woven together in a tangled through-line of embodied difference, but more often than not our experience of negotiating access (or lack thereof) is performed alone. This is because our experience of disability has been something we’ve been told is located exclusively in our bodies. As we move towards access as love, and our understandings of disability shift towards relational, social and political frameworks, access, like love, becomes complicated—but in a good way.

In the words of Carrie Bradshaw, this kind of love is “ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can't-live-without-each-other love.”

Image Description: Vanessa Dion Fletcher, Quillwork in twenty-nine parts, porcupine quill embroidery on paper, 6 x 9 inches. The quills are folded back and forth making a zigzag pattern and the design is raised off of soft paper. The colours of the embroidery are warm reds pinks and browns.

09/28/2019

Ebony Rose Dark performing for Brownton Abbey, Cripping the Arts (Michelle Peek Photography, courtesy of Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology & Access to Life, Re•Vision: The Centre for Art & Social Justice at the University of Guelph) Dictated by ableist logic, our world is one wherein...

09/18/2019

1 First, there is the nervousness that mixes with excitement, a bubbling in my gut when I start a new project, a new adventure, and especially a new job. The bubbling is like a chemical reaction and the fizzy stuff is energy that makes the drive to perform “normal” more intense. At the very begi...

08/13/2019

Whether it's through the Vessel or the accessibility of galleries, by not sufficiently supporting the neurodiverse and disabled communities, the art world is inadvertently reinforcing the ableism that pervades American society.

07/26/2019

Please support the 27 arists who lost their studios in a fire this past Monday. https://www.gofundme.com/f/aduffw-274-jarvis-ave-artist-relief?fbclid=IwAR0u2pD-8Jtw5rmydoQR2hTjmKLVXk758R_ZKIVwKbwaDHNMSjfqrKfSIzg

Early in the morning of July 22, 2019, a catastrophic fire destroyed 274 Jarvis Avenue in Winnipeg, MB. 274 Jarvis Avenue was studio space to more than two dozen Winnipeg-based artists and creative businesses. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/warehouse-fire-winnipeg-north-end-1.5219924 ...

07/17/2019

A super great small film festival in the town of Durham and at Saugeen First Nation includes a program of short films titled Love and Disability, curated by Joschi Shea this Saturday (July 20) night.http://fabfilmfest.ca/schedule.pdf

https://akimbo.ca/listings/fabulous-festival-of-fringe-film-july-18-to-27/

Terra Jean Long: 350 MYA 2019 Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film Thursday, July 18 to Saturday, July 20 in Hanover and Durham Saturday, July 27 in Saugeen First Nation It’s just one week before the launch of the 2019 Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film! Every summer, the Fabfilmfest welcomes art, film ...