Access Visual Art

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

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.

How Can I Work Here? Disrupting Institutional Obstacles to Access, Disclosures, and Change by Anonymous | Akimbo 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...

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/

Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film: July 18 to 27 | Akimbo 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 ...