On April 5, the Multicultural Center at Illinois State University hosted a hybrid event featuring six disabled artists who have been featured on the Institutional Model blog: Alex Dolores Salerno, Em Kettner, Jennifer Justice, Jessica Karuhanga, Jillian Crochet, and Emile Louise Gossiaux all appeared on Zoom and introduced their work, along with having a short discussion afterward. This year we were more scrupulous about providing image descriptions during the video, thanks to Emile Gossiaux's encouragement. The video and the transcript are shared below.
Sponsors included the ISU Wonsook Kim School of Art, the ISU Office of the President, the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the ISU Department of Special Education, the ISU Educational Diversity Enhancement Program, the ISU Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and the ISU Multicultural Center.
The transcript below has been edited for clarity (as has last year's symposium), though not for perfect readability. The time signatures don't line up perfectly with the video, as I edited out one two-minute section where I had an embarrassing struggle with Zoom (pro tip: never try to screenshare from Preview!).
TRANSCRIPT:
BERT:
12:02:02 So I'm gonna go ahead and get started. I'm gonna start the recording.
12:02:07 Actually let me do that. Okay, we're now recording. I'm not gonna mute you, but you might wanna mute yourself if you're not speaking ... I know the artists will be speaking shortly. Just to get started with introductions my
12:02:29 name is Albert Stabler. I'm an assistant professor in art education here at Illinois State University, which is where this event is taking place, I'll briefly describe myself.
12:02:42 I'm a fairly skinny, white, middle-aged man.
12:02:46 male presenting, cis guy with an N95 mask and reading glasses, short cropped brown hair, and a blue button down shirt with a black T-shirt and a blank wall behind me.
12:03:00 The artists who are taking part in this year's symposium, and I have not practiced pronunciation with all of you.
12:03:10 So please forgive me, and we'll correct pronunciation as we go along.
12:03:11 So here are Jessica, Karuhanga, Alex Dolores Salerno, Emilie Gossiaux, Jennifer Justice, Em Kettner and Jillian Crochet.
12:03:26 All of these artists have been featured over the past 8 months
12:03:29 On my anti-ableist art blog, Institutional Model.
12:03:34 And Jillian's post is still in production.
12:03:37 It'll be up soon.
12:03:40 ASL and captions will be provided today. So by all means pin the ASL interpreter-- I'm presuming she's here.
12:03:49 along with visual descriptions as necessary, so just a reminder to everybody who's speaking to describe things when needed.
12:04:00 And/or as requested. This event will be recorded, I will post the video with an edited transcript on my blog in the next month or so.
12:04:08 Please feel free to add comments or questions in the Zoom chat, and people in the room.
12:04:13 The in person room will be invited to ask questions after the artists have all introduced themselves and their work, and of course the zoom room as well, will be welcome to field questions.
12:04:27 Sponsors of today's event include the ISU Wonsook Kim School of Art.
12:04:32 The ISU Office of the President, the Program in Women's, Gender and Sexuality studies, the ISU Department of Special Education, the ISU educational diversity enhancement program, the ISU department of sociology and anthropology and the ISU multicultural center, where this in-person event is being held.
12:04:53 I'm going to read our life, labor, and land acknowledgement that we have in the School of Art here at Illinois State.
12:05:01 The Wonsook Kim School of Art at Illinois State University.
12:05:04 Acknowledges the African diaspora violently robbed of life, labor, land, safety, community, culture, and dignity.
12:05:12 During and after slavery. We also acknowledge those violently robbed of life, labor, land, safety, community, culture, and dignity through sexuality, gender, race, wealth, language, and ability hierarchies.
12:05:26 These hierarchies are and have been sustained by a range of power.
12:05:29 Formations, including the state.
12:05:32 The Wonsook Kim School of Art acknowledges that the Illinois State University, the center for the visual arts, and all we do takes place in the land of multiple native nations.
12:05:41 These lands were once home to the Illini, Peoria, Myaamia, and later, due to colonial encroachment and displacement, to the Fox,
12:05:49 Potawatomi, Sauk. Shawnee, Winnebago, Iowa, Mascouten, Piankashaw, Wea, and Kickapoo nations. We strive to honor the ongoing legacies of these and other indigenous peoples who may have been excluded in this
12:06:02 acknowledgement due to historical inaccuracy and erasure. And when I read this, I also personally want to acknowledge the necessity and the insufficiency of such statements in the absence of meaningful repatriation and reparation.
12:06:18 So I want to just jump into introducing the artists and having them introduce themselves and share their work, and of course they'll ask me for assistance, as they need it.
12:06:30 Hopefully, the speaker view works. Our first artist is Em Kettner.
12:06:35 I'm going to read Em's intro.
12:06:39 Em Kettner, born 1988, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an artist and writer based in Richmond, California.
12:06:46 She makes miniature sculptures and drawings that celebrate systems of mutual support, and that propose funny, salacious, and theatrical ways of moving through the world.
12:06:57 Recent solo exhibitions include sick Joke at Chapter New York and slow poke at Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles, California.
12:07:09 Em's work has been reviewed and published in Artforum, Art in America.
12:07:13 Sculpture magazine, Contemporary Art review LA, hyperallergic, 60 inches from center, and if that's my blog, Em
12:07:26 Is represented by Francois Ghebaly
12:07:29 In Los Angeles and New York.
12:07:32 And so I will turn over the floor to Em. If that works.
EM:
12:07:36 Awesome. Thank you, Bert. I'm gonna share my screen.
12:08:00 Can everyone see, just a there's a white screen at the moment.
12:08:04 So, okay, wonderful. So thank you. Again, Bert. And I'm just so honored to be here and be among so many artists that I admire, and with everyone else attending.
12:08:18 So, hello, this slide has a round- This slide has a smiling porcelain head, with green eyes and they're also leaning in to say Hello!
12:08:27 So I'm Em Kettner. My pronouns are she/
12:08:31 They. I'm joining from Oloni land on the west coast.
12:08:35 I've got long dark hair and white skin, and I'm wearing a brown shirt and I'm sitting in my studio with my weaving loom behind me.
12:08:45 I'm an artist and a person with a physical disability. And recently I've been wanting to communicate that experience through the objects I create.
12:08:57 So I mean sculptures, handrailings, tapestries, and drawings.
12:09:02 But for this short presentation I'm just gonna focus on a few examples from my recent sculpture series.
12:09:08 So this is like a an odd couple to start with.
12:09:13 We've got a porcelain figure that's balanced on a painted square tile.
12:09:18 The sculptures wearing a hand woven orange, yellow, and blue costume.
12:09:23 It's bowing. It's kind of shaped like an inch worm with a dramatically arced back and one hand extended in a placating or welcoming gesture.
12:09:35 One of its legs is resting on the tile, and the tile shows a groveling figure licking the floor, while a doctor barks orders from a doorway.
12:09:46 So this duo kind of distills 2 of my main themes. in the case of the sculpture.
12:09:53 There's this flamboyant, mischievous, and joyful way of moving through the world, and, conversely, in the tile, there's this looming threat of exploitation and oppression for doing that very thing.
12:10:08 But I want to expand on the joy. And so this is a self-portrait of me getting a piggyback ride, which is how my partner or other friends have carried me up stairs or hills, and whenever I'm relying on another person to help me move through the
12:10:24 world. I feel the edges of my own body just melt away, and it's wonderful.
12:10:30 It's like I temporarily gain extra limbs that move in tandem with mine.
12:10:35 And so to illustrate that in this piece the smaller figure has a head and arms, but the rest of their body disappears or merges into their supportive partner. the larger figure squats with their hands resting on their knees, and they're smiling back at at their buddy on their
12:10:54 shoulders, and all of the limbs in this sculpture, and in every sculpture.
12:11:00 I'm going to show have been woven over, in this case with a diamond pattern, in shades of brown, orange, and black.
12:11:08 So it's essentially a two-headed, six-limbed composite being.
12:11:14 Neither body is defined by a lack, but rather made more powerful as this sort of hybrid unit.
12:11:21 And I really think that this pleasurable sort of expansion beyond the bounds of your individual body.
12:11:27 It's similar to sensations that people equate with spiritual or erotic encounters.
12:11:33 So I just want to show that disability and dependency or interdependency can be other access points to these sort of higher realms.
12:11:44 So, with a nod to those spiritual realms and rituals, and also the submission that's typically associated with those spaces.
12:11:55 Here's a supplicant figure, they're humbly crawling and they're clothed in pink.
12:12:01 They have a hunched back and a kind of wary expression.
12:12:06 One of my main motivations is to show how desirable and beautiful a particular body or condition is, especially considering the pervasive narrative is that disability is, quote unquote, not welcome at the altar, that it implies a moral lack or a brokenness a lot of
12:12:27 my sculptures like this one are made from broken pieces that are held together by their decorative woven coverings and they are miniature, to reference votive objects, and these objects were often left on altars as offerings, and pleas, for relief from pain and
12:12:49 deformity. This sculpture, similarly extends both of its hands to offer up a shining blue mask with sad red eyes, but so I want to
12:13:01 usurp and twist that ritual, and treat the objects as complete and venerated in their own right.
12:13:08 So similar to the piggyback object I showed before.
12:13:12 This is another hybrid body, here combined with a prosthetic, their wheelchair, it's about 5 inches high.
12:13:21 It would fit in the palm of your hand. It's got a coy head that sprouts from a bar that connects 2 wheels.
12:13:30 That's its body. And it's woven over in brown and orange checkered patterns.
12:13:35 My father. My dad's in a wheelchair, and I have a similar rare, in fact, as yet uncatalogued degenerative disease.
12:13:45 So it's been personally important for me to sort of celebrate bodies like this and present them as beautiful, having what are the ideopathic condition can be lonely, or, you know, scary.
12:14:00 But it also affords me the opportunity to define for myself my own body, to propose new representative images and originate ways of moving through the world.
12:14:11 So here's that same wheelchair sculpture installed on a long, narrow pedestal, and it's it's meant to look like it's rolling toward another figure who's crawling up a step on the far right it's got tracks
12:14:26 sanded out behind its wheels. And there's also imprints under the hands of the other piece, so it's almost as if these sculptures are wearing through the wooden top by the force of their slow and steady movements.
12:14:40 Okay, so those pieces were installed to imply some forward motion.
12:14:45 But often we are still. We're resting, sick, healing.
12:14:49 We're getting it on, in bed. So I started thinking about the bed as a setting.
12:14:54 Where our sense of our own independent body.
12:14:58 expands, and so I could also use the square bed shape as a miniature frame loom, and this allowed me to weave more complicated tapestries, involving more figures.
12:15:10 So this slide features 2 sculptures like that. Both of them are hybrid bed people.
12:15:16 I'm just gonna zoom in on the one on the left.
12:15:18 This is called the Comedian's Bed. It's got 2 roundheaded porcelain jesters with red hair, that are looking at each other on the top edge.
12:15:29 made of clay, and then on their quilt There's jumbled limbs and faces that are stitched among green and yellow squares, it's kind of like a clown juggling replicas of its own head in a fever dream or something and then the bed on the
12:15:46 right is called the Swingers, and it's kind of literally collapsing under the raucous action playing out across its surface.
12:15:57 And through this its bed legs, and its human limbs are jostled and combined to merge the people with their furniture.
12:16:05 The entire sculpture is glazed and woven over with tiny black and white triangles.
12:16:13 Some of the heads that pop through the quilts are kissing, or they're engaged in other suggestive erotic activity.
12:16:20 So in both sculptures there's no clear distinction among the component parts.
12:16:25 The figures and their beds become one seamless entity.
12:16:31 Part body, part supportive and protective structure, that mutually supportive network is something very holy to me, and so I'm just gonna wrap it up and tie the bed to the altar in my final slide.
12:16:46 This is a image from a recent installation in LA, where I kind of created my own altar, and it's set low so that it's visible from a seated or kneeling position.
12:16:57 It's about the size of a bed, and it's topped with a floating piece of ash wood, and on this altar, are all of these hybrid figures, like the ones I showed today.
12:17:08 They're relaxing and healing and embracing and inching toward each other, and they're each carving out trails through the wood as they go.
12:17:18 It's a scene that I hope acts as a kind of love letter to my community and to all of the various social bonds that quite literally prop me up.
12:17:29 So thank you so much for letting me share this work.
BERT:
12:17:57 As I was saying, thank you. I had pinned my face over yours so I'm sorry for that, for a little while there.
12:18:06 No worries.
12:18:04 Em, thank you. Let's see if my face still isn't popping up yet, but that's all right.
12:18:10 We'll be moving on to another artist. But please keep all of the thoughts, ideas, inspiration.
12:18:16 You had, feel free to drop questions in the chat at any point.
12:18:20 Obviously the artist can see them and think about them.
12:18:22 And we'll move on to Emilie.
12:18:27 Emilie Louise Gossiaux, and I want to try to navigate her images.
12:18:34 while she speaks, but I'm gonna introduce her first to start then, and can't tell who's here.
12:18:43 But I hope Emilie is here.
12:18:45 Emilie Louise Gossiaux is a multidisciplinary artist, based in New York City.
12:18:51 She received a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2014 and an MFA.
12:18:57 In sculpture from Yale School of Art in 2019.
12:19:02 Since losing her vision, due to a traffic accident in 2010, Gossiaux's altered experiences have influenced her practice's
12:19:10 Trajectory, drawing on inspiration from dreams, memories, and non-visual sensory perceptions, Gossiaux connects to landscape and body without sight, as such her drawings and ceramics pertain deeply to bodily autonomy, exploring themes such
12:19:26 as love, intimacy, and the interdependent relationships between humans and non-human species.
12:19:31 Much of her work is inspired by the interspecies bond she has with her guide dog London, and celebrates disability pride, simultaneously she disrupts the Anthropocene understanding of agency, and the hierarchic ordering between humans and animals. Gossiaux's recent solo shows
12:19:49 include Significant Otherness and Memory of a Body, both at Mother Gallery in New York.
12:19:54 Her participation in group shows both domestic and internationally include the Wellcome collection, the Aldritch Contemporary, MoMA PS1,
12:20:03 museum fur moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Gallery 400, the Krannert Art Museum, the Shed, and Sculpture Center.
12:20:13 Among others. Gossiaux was awarded a John F.
12:20:15 Kennedy Center VSA prize, the Wynn Newhouse award, an NYFA Barbara and Carlos Sidney Grant, the Colleen Brown art prize, the Pudeo Production Prize, and is currently an artist in residence at the Queens Museum, Jerome Hill
12:20:30 Fellowship. Her work has been featured in publications such as the Brooklyn Rail, the New Yorker, Art in America, and Topical Cream Magazine.
12:20:38 So Emilie feel free to start, and I'm going to try to share my preview.
12:20:50 And we'll see how this goes.
12:20:53 So, Emilie, which image did you want to start with?
12:21:00 You might be muted as well.
12:21:11 Emilie? I thought I saw your name on a screen. I hope you're here.
12:21:19 Anybody. Seeing Emily. Hello!
EMILIE:
12:21:19 Hi! Hello! Sorry about that. I didn't know how to unmute my mic. Nice to be here, anyway.
12:21:28 Thank you very much. Can you show us "true love will find you in the end" first?
12:21:42 Okay. Thank you. Hi. My name's Emilie Louise Gossiaux.
12:21:49 I am a blind artist, and I'll give a brief description of myself
12:21:54 I go by she/her/hers pronouns, I'm a light-skinned woman and I have shoulder length hair, blue eyes.
12:22:27 I wear a cochlear implant device in my left ear, and a hearing aid in my right ear, right now I have headphones over my ears, and I have a a gold nose ring.
12:22:42 in my right nostril and I'm wearing silver earrings with fish hooks on them.
12:22:49 So I will describe my first image that Bert has on the screen for me.
12:22:56 This sculpture is called "true love will find you in the end," and it is a human scale.
12:23:03 Figurative sculpture. There's 2 figures, on the left side is a hybridized anthropomorphic sculpture with a dog's body with a woman's head, and the woman's head has short combed back hair,
12:23:26 she has dark eyebrows and human eyes, with very long eyelashes, and she is looking slightly to her right at another figure that she's holding hands with, the second figure.
12:23:45 On the right is of a woman's body, with a dog's head, and the dog's head has a very like human quality.
12:23:54 Eyes, like almond shaped eyes, with long eyelashes, and that figure is looking slightly to her left.
12:24:05 And this sculpture is made out of polystyrene foam and paper mache.
12:24:11 The quality of the paper mache kind of looks like it's made out of stone but it's actually it's very smooth.
12:24:20 To the touch. So it kind of feels like stone, too, which I like, and this sculpture is kind of a group portrait of myself.
12:24:31 With my guide dog London, and I fused, I hybridized our bodies together so that the dog's head is fashioned after my dog London, who is an English Labrador retriever, as well as the dog's body on the left, to kind of distort this hierarchy or take down the
12:24:54 hierarchy that takes place between humans and animals, but also between non-disabled and disabled people, to kind of like.
12:25:05 See these 2 joining hands together in an affectionate way, that also kind of symbolizes my relationship with London being joyful and loving and affectionate, and also very supportive and interdependent.
12:25:30 I hope that that's a good enough description.
12:25:34 Then the next image. This is an example of one of my drawings.
12:25:40 I call it London Midsummer, and that's I drew it with a ballpoint.
12:25:48 Pen and Crayon colors. In the center of the drawing is a maypole that is emerging from the ground, the maypole I drew to look like my white cane.
12:28:04 It's 23 inches tall and 35 inches wide.
12:28:08 So it's a big drawing, and so I'll just describe it really quickly.
12:28:14 In the center of the drawing is a maypole that I drew to look like my white cane.
12:28:20 It has a black loop on the top of the handle, and there's a white ceramic tip at the bottom, and it's a telescopic cane.
12:28:32 So it folds out, and you can see the lines where there's divisions, where the cane can collapse.
12:28:44 Further in the landscape there's trees in the background.
12:28:54 The white cane maypole emerges taller than the trees, the trees are all
12:29:00 colored like green and yellow greens and dark greens
12:29:04 that kind of reminds me of the birth of spring, in the sky above the tree line
12:29:12 There's a a crescent moon that's a very pale blue, and then a sun that is a very bright yellow orange, and on the ground, circling around the white cane maypole.
12:29:25 Are 3 Labrador retriever dogs standing up on their hind legs, and they're holding onto pink ribbons that attach to the top of the maypole.
12:29:38 And the dogs' bodies are very joyful, like they're prancing around.
12:29:45 They also have human arms and hands so they can hold onto the ribbons, then at the bottom, on the ground there's some flowers that are, I believe, red in color, and they kind of scatter around around the dogs.
12:30:03 So this is actually a a drawing that I am going to turn into an installation at the Queens Museum, that will open this fall.
12:30:17 Where I'll have like 3 life size out dogs circling around a white cane maypole that will be 15 feet tall, and then on the walls behind the maypole and the dogs there'll be a high relief mural of trees and a sun and a moon above that
12:30:41 and this giant installation celebrates this agency and joy that I feel, to be able to move around in the world with independently with a white cane, but also the joy of being able to communicate and work with my guide.
12:31:06 Dog. I feel like when we work together. It's like a dance the way we communicate, it's been a really special learning process for me.
12:31:19 I feel that in a way London connects me closer to nature, and I really enjoy seeing the world through, or imagining that I can see the world through London's eyes.
12:31:33 And yeah, so that's all I can share. Thank you Bert.
BERT:
12:32:05 Thank you. Jillian. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you, Emily, for your patience.
12:32:11 I don't host zoom things very much, so bear with me. Thank you. Everybody.
12:32:16 But that was wonderful Emilie, and I was saying, I'm really happy and excited to hear that drawing is going to be an installation.
12:32:24 But we'll circle back to you.
12:32:27 any and all things people would like to dwell on.
12:32:31 But let's move on to our next artist. Thank you,
12:32:35 Emilie and Em. Our next artist, is Jessica Karuhanga, Jessica Karuhanga is a first-generation Canadian artist, of British Ugandan heritage, whose work addresses issues of cultural politics of identity and black diasporic
12:32:51 concerns through lens based technologies, writing, drawing, and performances. Through her practice she explores individual and collective concerns of Black subjectivity, illness, rage, grief, desire, and longing.
12:33:06 Within the context of Black embodiment. She was the 2020 - 2021 recipient of Concordia University's SpokenWeb Artist/Curator In Residence Fellowship. Karuhanga has presented her work at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (2021), SummerWorks Lab (Toronto, 2020), The Bentway (Toronto, 2019), Nuit Blanche (Toronto, 2018), Onsite Gallery (Toronto, 2018) and Goldsmiths University (London, UK, 2017). Karuhanga's writing has been published by C Magazine, BlackFlash, Susan Hobbs Gallery and Fonderie Darling. She has been featured in AGO's Artist Spotlight, i-D, DAZED, Visual Aids, Border Crossings, Exclaim!, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, esse, filthy dreams, Globe and Mailand Canadian Art. She earned her BFA from Western University and MFA from University of Victoria. She is an Assistant Professor at Western University.
12:34:07 Jessica, you have the floor.
JESSICA:
Hello, everyone. I'm Jessica Karuhanga.
12:34:26 I am currently in my office at the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, where I teach.
12:34:33 I'm wearing a dark green knitted sweater.
12:34:37 The woven pattern looks kind of like plates or small vertical braids.
12:34:44 I'm wearing a black cotton head wrap that folds up into a roll.
12:34:49 That kind of looks like the shape of a flower on the right side of my head.
12:34:52 I'm also wearing gold hoop earrings, but
12:34:55 I'm not quite sure if they quite show up on the screen.
12:34:57 My skin is brown, and my background is blurred, due to a filter setting that I'm using.
12:35:05 I wanted to start by saying that I'm so grateful to be sharing virtual space with all of you today. In my own practice, I work through performance, video, sound, drawing.
12:35:18 To be perfectly honest, I usually begin with kind of a concept, or an idea, or a feeling, and I just move towards whatever material makes the most sense to connote or communicate that message, and in terms of things my practice is about, exploring a politics of desirability, beauty, illness
12:35:44 isolation, translation, some of the things that were mentioned in my biography.
12:35:49 So I'm gonna share my screen. I have some slides to share.
12:36:16 Okay. So I wanted to start with a project called No Other Findings.
12:36:25 It's a single channel video work. It is a silent video that I'm going to play while I speak.
12:36:35 So this video is a series of calibration scans of my body produced by a magnetic resonance imaging machine, also known as an MRI.
12:36:47 And these scans are always black and white, square images.
12:36:52 In this video, I have positioned these images in the center of a black 16.
12:36:58 By 9 or standard wide screen aspect ratio, and between each scan is a transition that fades out and in, and the kind of rhythm or pacing of this is intended to mirror the pace of breathing, meditative breathing, which is something that I do to calm myself
12:37:18 down to stay still when I take these tests, the scans track the development of my chronic illness and genetic condition. while they contain deeply personal information about my internal worlds, they also reveal very little to those unfamiliar with how to read medical imaging or the
12:37:39 body in this way. For me also, the fact that these are calibration images.
12:37:45 They don't really say much. You see an MRI, or a CT scan, and you know you're looking at images that are kind of the cross section of of a body part or organ.
12:37:57 So these are incredibly intimate, but they withhold so much to
12:38:02 The non specialist viewer. And for me these images question, raise questions about the evidentiary function of these technologies.
12:38:10 And what happens when illness can't easily be seen, and when they move in and out of visibility. So I'm gonna go to the next slide.
12:38:22 So right now we're looking at an installation view of the next video, that I'm gonna play a little bit for you.
12:38:33 And basically it's in a gallery space.
12:38:37 There's veneered wooden paneled floors, and we're looking at a constructed room where
12:38:46 the walls don't go all the way to the ceiling.
12:38:50 It's almost like temporary walls that you would install in a gallery, and there's a projection onto the wall, almost filling the whole wall and it's of my torso, and this is a still image of a video piece called "body and soul."
12:39:04 So, if "no other findings," which is a video that I previously shared, is about my internal world, body.
12:39:12 And soul is more about society's fascination with color, surface, skin.
12:39:20 The title is a reference to the jazz standard made popular by Billie Holiday in the 1930s.
12:39:25 And in this video piece for me skin, my skin is a synecdoche for race as a sign of social difference in the image.
12:39:37 You see my torso, which is filigreed by tumors connected to my genetic condition, and I really wanted to present my body almost as a landscape.
12:39:50 So then it becomes about the cartography of my body, and invites a kind of special consideration, not just of blackness, but also breath.
12:40:02 And it kind of cuts off beneath my breasts and cuts off on the other end, just above my, just at my hip bone, and I'm laying in front of a white wall, and so this was filmed in my bedroom, however, for me, because
12:40:16 it's projected on the white walls of the you know.
12:40:20 Quote, institution, end, quote, and I'm in a white space.
12:40:23 I think it also draws attention towards legacies of medicalized bodies and hospital institutions as well, and invariably anyone reading this is going to come along with their kind of projections or interpretations of what this is or means. so I'm gonna play.
12:40:44 A bit of the video. I'm playing a silent version of this video.
12:40:47 But typically you hear the sound of breathing, and I recorded the sound at the same time, but separately.
12:40:57 So what happens is... I kind of misaligned it in the edit in post production, where the inhales, you see my body inhaling while you hear the exhaling, and part of that is to kind of be honest about the technology kind of at hand.
12:41:15 But also to kind of bring you back into the sort of real as you watch on this, and hopefully you relax in your body and witnessing it.
12:41:28 And both this video and the video that I previously showed, when I installed them.
12:41:32 I played them on loops. for me also, body and soul can maybe bring up ideas around Cartesian subjectivity and I think, therefore, I am, those kinds of things. "Body and soul" has been exhibited a couple of times.
12:41:48 "No other findings," I produced it in a residency.
12:41:52 It's actually being exhibited for the first time, in my upcoming solo exhibition, and how I'm having I'm having these 2 videos.
12:42:00 Actually installed in relationship to one another. So what would happen is you enter a room
12:42:08 And this video is projected on the wall. And there's seating, a lot of my video works are quite long,
12:42:15 They can range from being 15 min to 40 min, particularly my media works.
12:42:23 And I'm interested in experiencing with time and temporality, and the demands that can do
12:42:29 But I also always want to create a relaxing space where people kind of can sit and spend time.
12:42:35 They don't have to feel rushed to exit, or leave that experience.
12:42:40 So what happens is you enter the space. And there are speakers. You hear the breathing.
12:42:44 You can stay with this piece as long as you need or want to, and then you exit the room and turn around the other side of the wall, embedded in the wall is a monitor.
12:42:54 That plays the video, no other findings. So there's this interesting thing about private and public space inside, outside.
12:43:02 That was something that I just thought of in this context.
12:43:06 So I wanted to share that. I don't wanna go over time, so I may not share all of these works.
12:43:17 So I'm just gonna skip a few things. I'm gonna share a couple of sculptures.
12:43:24 Sculpture works now, so in this image, it's also in a gallery space where there's these kind of wooden veneered floors that are stained in this beige kind of hue, in the background, on the wall you can see 2 square benches
12:43:48 with 2 pairs of headphones that are plugged into the wall.
12:43:52 That is a separate sound piece that I may not have time to get in today, but maybe will come up in the Q&A. You also see a speaker in the corner. Those are for other works.
12:44:03 The sculpture that I want to focus on is called "Kiss.
12:44:05 The Sky," that's taken from Jimi Hendrix. on the title, a lot of my titles I take from lines of poems like I might later.
12:44:16 It might be a line or phrase or words that really resonate with me, or might be.
12:44:23 There's always something kind of lyrical or poetic that happens there.
12:44:26 So in this piece there is, you see, a mound of asphalt.
12:44:35 So this is found asphalt that I've just been collecting on the sides of the roads, that is, from, you know.
12:44:41 Snowplows that way are clearing the snow, and then it kind of damages the roads that need to be paved every so often.
12:44:48 So I've just been collecting rocks, and then I also collected or bought asphalt, like pothole filler, and also used that to fill in the other spaces, and then it's doused in sealant that you use to seal
12:45:06 driveways in, and these ropes, I have about 3 or 4 of these sculptures now, and the rope is called Manila rope.
12:45:16 I got it from the Home Depot. It's the only place that I can find that sells it where I am, anyway, and Manila rope is actually made from.
12:45:26 The banana plant. So obviously when you see rope, it connotes ideas around a noose, maybe even an anchor, like it seems like the type of rope you would use to anchor a boat to something, and usually I have this hooked up to
12:45:44 a pulley on the ceiling, and in its current installation.
12:45:48 It's about 50 feet up into the sky, and when you see multiples of them alongside each other, they almost look like sails in space
12:45:57 And then also because of the lighting in the gallery, you kind of see these lines as drawings through space, so they're a bit precarious and they're also kind of balanced.
12:46:07 But I was really interested in the ideas of sinkholes, or also just transportation and what am I looking for, not communication- commuting.
12:46:30 And also I come from a post industrial context.
12:46:33 I grew up in the Great Lakes region, in Sarnia, derogatively known as the Chemical Valley.
12:46:42 A lot of our oil comes from that area. Geographic area.
12:46:48 The villages outside of Sarnia are called things like Petrolea, petroleum. Things like that.
12:46:55 So I was really drawn to using these kind of plastic, rubber, kind of toxic materials as a way to kind of comment on.
12:47:04 So there's a geographic aspect to it. There's a thing about access as well for me.
12:47:11 So that's that piece. And I also think there's kind of these more poetic apps as well.
BERT:
12:47:38 So you're fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing that, that was wonderful.
12:47:44 And so I'm gonna hopefully with, without too many more glitches, we'll move to Alex, Alex Dolores Salerno. Again thank you.
12:47:56 Everybody who's gone so far. Alex Dolores Salerno is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Informed by queer-crip experience, community, and culture, they work to critique standards of productivity, notions of normative embodiment, 24/7 society, and the commodification of rest. Salerno received their MFA from Parsons School of Design, and they have exhibited at venues such as Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts (Brussels), and the Ford Foundation Gallery (NYC). Salerno is a recipient of the 2022 Wynn Newhouse Award, and they are currently an artist in residence at Abrons Arts Center.
AlEX:
12:48:42 Hi, thanks so much for having me. I'm gonna just start by sharing my screen.
12:48:55 Okay. So thanks so much for inviting me, and I'm really excited to be in conversation with this group.
12:49:10 My pronouns are they them. I'm a chronically ill and autistic white Latinx person, with a dark shoulder length mullet, wearing a grey sweater.
12:49:20 Behind me my background is blurred, and my stim toy for today is this orange and green interlocking clickie loop.
12:49:31 It's usually off screen, but I like to show it.
12:49:34 Anyways, today, I'm gonna just show a recent video work that I talked about on the Institutional Model blog called, "arranged with care."
12:49:45 And it's a roughly 4 min video that I made to explore some of the things in my mostly sculptural practice.
12:49:54 And also to further explore and play with the aesthetics of disability and access.
12:49:59 So some things that I'm interested in include slow pacing and slowness as a rejection of urgency, cultural and family traditions as a form of access.
12:50:10 And how spending time in nature, or with plant life, is often a very regulating, grounding, invigorating, or a joyful sensory experience for autistic people like myself, and also how different access practices, like captioning, visual description, language interpretation or touch objects can
12:50:32 be used aesthetically and materially.
12:50:38 So on the screen is an image of the video installed at the Ford Foundation Gallery in Manhattan there are 2 TV monitors that are mounted vertically side by side on a black wall, which kind of mimics their original iPhone video format and in front
12:50:58 of them is a pinkish red bench, which has 3 round seating pads in a similar color, which is the color of Ecuadorian horchata, which is a type of drink, and is the focus of the video.
12:51:12 And I'll describe the video in a bit. There's also a small airplane pillowcase that's been stuffed with a lot of the dried form of most of the herbs that are shown in the video and it's somewhat heavy when picked up, and to indicate that it's a
12:51:29 touch object. I embroidered the words, "Hold me" and "Puedes tocarme" on it, and I also wanted to thank each other senses.
12:51:38 So it has a nice smell, but it was also important to me
12:51:41 For access, that it was a subtle and natural smell rather than an overwhelming one.
12:51:48 So the videos would be in the gallery on a loop, and one is the original video in Spanish and the audio of the other.
12:51:58 One is interpreted into English, and each of them, it's not in the image, but they would have their own pair of headphones.
12:52:11 When my mom went back to Ecuador in the fall of 2021, and I couldn't join her, since I wasn't flying, and I didn't wanna travel from New York with its high covid rates.
12:52:22 She recorded and sent me an iPhone video as a unplanned surprised that I was really touched by, and in the video she arranged each herb on individual plates, and she goes from plate to plate and names each one with the help of my aunt to remind her what the names
12:52:43 of all the herbs are, and something that I wanted to see happen was having both Spanish and English audio captions and visual description.
12:52:52 All in the same place, something that I was noticing was how on Zoom when there's live language interpretation, you often have to click a link that takes you out of the zoom, and also having a doubling of language spoken and captions wasn't something that I really see much in
12:53:11 gallery spaces, so I'm gonna quickly show a few snippets.
12:53:16 And I'm gonna start with the English version, to give the visual description, and then I'm gonna pause that and skip like halfway through the Spanish version and just show like maybe 10 seconds.
12:53:32 Of my mom, bringing the camera close up to the herbs on the plates, and naming them.
VIDEO:
12:53:41 "In a brightly lit dining room, my mom and my aunt have placed over a dozen plates on a table covered by a brown striped Ecuadorian tablecloth, the plates are various sizes, and most are white with decorative rims.
12:53:54 Arranged with care, each plate holds a different herb. There's one plate of seeds and one bunch of purple leaves. the rest of the herbs are all bright green. A few of them have flowers
12:54:11 And all of them are fresh. At the center of the table.
12:54:15 Is a bowl of sugar, a bottle of honey.
12:54:17 And three limes. My mom shows me all of the herbs from behind her iphone camera.
12:54:24 The camera shakes a bit as she moves from plate to plate, picking up some of the herbs and taking a close look at each one. I am glad to present..."
ALEX:
12:54:34 Now I'm switching to the Spanish one.
VIDEO:
"En el comedor brilliantemente illuminado, tenemos aquí una planta muy bonita, muy interesante-- (Tia Carmita) Linaza-- que se llama la linaza, y aquí tenemos ya la linaza en semilla. Este es el llanten-- (Tia Carmita) Llanten-- Esta hierba es el toronjil-- (Tia Carmita) Toronjil.-- y esta es el hinojo-- (Tia Carmita) Hinojo.-- Esta planta allí con flores moradas muy bonitas, es el borraja.-- (Tia Carmita) Borraja.-- Esta planta como pueden ver, y se pueden acordar por sus flores amarillas."
ALEX:
12:54:45 So on the screen now is the first installation image.
12:55:26 Again, and since I wanted to make the video accessible in gallery space for blind people and people with low vision in both languages, I interpreted and recorded the audio in English, and at the time I was thinking a lot about translation versus interpretation.
12:55:49 and I was also realizing that I could never really recreate the back and forth conversation between my mom and aunt in a recording studio between me and my mom.
12:56:05 So what I decided to do was make an interpreted version with a back and forth between my mom and I, and have her.
12:56:14 reimagine the dialogue more organically, and this process also ended up reflecting what the collaboration was for me, which was a way for me to ask my mom to teach me Spanish.
12:56:24 When she wasn't able to when I was younger. I'd be kind of interested in having a doubling of language and captioning, as also as a way to slow down and listen twice.
12:56:37 I also find that in my video work I enjoy making the captions really big.
12:56:42 And in the center of the screen. And this does a few different things for me.
12:56:46 It says that the captions are a focal point and not an add on.
12:56:50 They can be seen from very far away, and I feel that this way they appear as if they were telling a story, and I'll end by saying that in my right now, in my practice, I'm continuing to play with the aesthetics of access and video.
12:57:11 In a variety of ways. And I'm using that word play intentionally as something that for me is very much.
12:57:17 Part of reclaiming rest and pleasure, and a word that brings joy to practices that institutions typically see as protocol or a last minute accommodation. And I'll stop there. Thank you.
BERT:
12:57:30 Thank you so much, Alex. That was really cool. I love that piece, totally fantastic.
12:57:39 So I've we're gonna just kinda keep going as long as... this is a concept called Crip time.
12:57:48 If people haven't heard about it, it definitely applies with my inability to navigate my own screen.
12:57:55 I'm going to switch up the last 2 folks who are going.
12:57:59 But I'm gonna you know keep going as long as people are on the zoom and willing to willing to chat.
12:58:05 But for our second to last artist presenter, I'm gonna move spots and have Jillian Crochet go next, hopefully that's okay with Jillian, and I'll I'll go ahead.
12:58:48 thank you so much, and thank you.
12:58:54 Everybody who's gone so far, again. I'm really enjoying.
12:58:56 This is so crip timey
12:58:59 I love it. Jillian Crochet is a Bay Area artist from the Gulf Coast working in sculpture, video, and performance. Her sculptures use haptic and embodied aesthetics to challenge the hierarchy of the senses. Her practice questions the medical model, desire for control, and the complex ethics of genetics and experimentation. Familial artifacts, found objects, luscious textiles, medical supplies, and natural elements become haunting amorphous surrogates to explore disability and grief. The unceasing work of self-advocacy led her to explore performance art. Her practice seeks to liberate the disabled body from normalized marginalization and oppression. She earned her BFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 and an MFA in Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in May 2020. She is a 2020-21 Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts. She has shown her work, performed and hosted workshops in the Bay Area and the Gulf Coast, such as SOMArts, BAMPFA the Mobile Art Council, the Mobile Museum of Art, the OHR-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Mississippi. Her sculptures were commissioned as awards for the Morris Dees Justice Award by the Morris Dees Poverty Law Center.
JILLIAN:
13:00:31 Hi! Thanks Bert and everybody who's gone so far.
13:00:40 Give me a second to do the screen sharing thing with. Always kind of throws me off because it's like doing 35 things at once.
13:00:57 Share screen.
13:01:22 And does everybody see like a rock with a reflex hammer?
13:01:26 Yes.
13:01:33 Yeah, I'm Jillian Crochet. I'm on the.
13:01:38 unceded land of the Oloni people, otherwise known as Oakland, California.
13:01:48 I use she/her pronouns, and I am a white woman with pinkish cream skin, short, dark, curly brown hair, and glasses, and I have on a cheetah print, brown and black.
13:02:08 Long sleeve shirt dress, and you can see my power chair behind me, and cream walls as well. I generally move around a lot,
13:02:22 wiggle, stretch myself to alleviate pain, and sometimes wave my hands around and I do twirl my hair while I'm talking.
13:02:36 Rocks have been on my mind a lot lately, and throughout my practice. I think they're great objects to think about extended time and rest.
13:02:49 Among other things, here is, I'm gonna share 2 works.
13:02:56 This one is, "does this feel normal?"
13:03:03 And I'm gonna share a little bit and then describe it.
13:03:10 And I don't hear audio.
13:03:15 I don't either.
13:03:20 Well, I'll describe the audio for you. So, frustration and the amusement led to this video. it is meant to be played in a loop, and the audio is meant to be kind of echoing through the space, marrying the reverberation of the sound in the
13:03:41 video caused by the travel, a sound from the hammer to the rock, to the table, to the cement that's in an empty room, and shot from above.
13:03:55 It is a palm size, round rock on top of a white and blue and green grid.
13:04:01 Hospital gown, a partially visible fist holds the steel handle of the reflex hammer, which glints light.
13:04:11 A visualization of the energy carried out from my own nerves through the handle to the rock.
13:04:18 The orange rubber triangle hits the rock, and this causes the rock to wobble around the table.
13:04:27 The sound can kind of oscillate between slightly unnerving and trance inducing, if you watch it for long enough.
13:04:40 This piece is obviously about frustrations with the medical industrial complex, but can extend to institutional frustration.
13:04:57 It examines bodily autonomy, dissociation, like a separation from the body, and haptics and time.
13:05:20 This is an image of me buried under a pile of grey lumpies.
13:05:26 Only my head and green shoes are visible, my eyes are closed, and there's the traces.
13:05:32 of sand spillage on the floor. There is a white wall on a light gray cement floor.
13:05:40 This is shot from a performance video done after these objects had been installed in a museum show for a year. I affectionately call them lumpies
13:05:53 Their official name, resting rocks, are various shades of gray silk velvet rock shaped objects filled with sand.
13:06:03 They range in size, from like tiny kitten to large body.
13:06:10 There are around 38, in this picture there's not all of them are there.
13:06:18 All of them equal 800 pounds. This amount is around 3 to 400 pounds and some can be picked up and cradled, but the larger ones are about 200 pounds.
13:06:37 I started making these objects due to my own sensory related disabilities, and you can stroke or smush them, and they move in a way that can also provide stim.
13:06:51 I'll try and like briefly summarize some of the words that I have written down.
13:06:59 But people tend to be quite aggressive with the work, and they do leak.
13:07:08 And so during that exhibition, I would have to come back and mend them, and also.
13:07:19 People like in the gallery
13:07:26 Would mend them, like the curators would come in and mend them. here is a video of me mending one of the larger ones, the angle shot from above and in front of me, my hands and arms.
13:07:46 Are visible, as I stitch another patch on top of a large body size gray lumpy, in a pile.
13:07:55 As I said, the lumpie inherently leak and bust from repetitive handling, and then require mending, which is integral to the work, and crip beings and spaces can be messy, and people are really uncomfortable.
13:08:10 With messy, especially like this sterile institutional museum. The mess was like a big problem for the institution, because they couldn't reckon with how to provide continuous care for the work, which brought to the front the labor politics of care, and institutions want preservation to maintain value, that's kind
13:08:40 of like the underlying institutional structure, and they create rules and guidelines and bureaucracies, and the hierarchies of labor and value in our society generally dictate that physical labor is not valued the same as white collar labor, and so their solution
13:09:03 was, they wanted me to remake all the lumpies with a lining, so they wouldn't leak, or to take the large
13:09:12 Take the large massive ones out of the show. But to me this is like saying disabled bodies are too messy to be in a museum, and they need to be made to fit, or hidden away.
13:09:28 And so I insisted on keeping them as is, and we had to do lots of work and compromise, to
13:09:40 Move on, or, you know, keep them in the show and moving on.
13:09:45 This is just a quick image to end, and it's a blue sign with white lettering that, says "built and maintained for certain bodies" on a metal sign post next to the top of a wooden staircase, and, put in quotes, "nature" with trees and shrubs all around and that's
13:10:09 it for me!
BERT:
13:10:11 Fantastic!
13:10:29 I really appreciate Jillian's like,
13:10:36 The advocacy aspect of her work extends to her artwork.
13:10:41 It seems, you know, seamless, to make a pun, on how much advocacy she has to do with her artwork
13:10:48 So last and very much not least, the very, very patient and otherwise wonderful artist Jennifer Justice is gonna be our last presenting artist.
13:11:01 And so I'm gonna introduce Jennifer.
13:11:03 And then hopefully, if folks, if folks are, if you want to leave, of course please leave when you have to.
13:11:09 But hopefully we'll have some people who wanna hang around and chat a little bit.
13:11:12 Jennifer Justice is an artist and writer living in Mendocino County. She develops speculative sculptural environments that invite multi-sensory, performative encounters with handmade, machined, and computer-generated artifacts. Her work has been exhibited at the Palo Alto Art Center, SOMAarts, San Francisco, the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, StoreFrontLab, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Birmingham Museum of Art. Her writing appears in Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation, from Routledge. She is currently serving as Researcher-in-Residence for the Leonardo Foundation CripTech Incubator devoted to cripping the metaverse. So Jennifer!
JENNIFER:
13:12:11 I am. I'm Jennifer Justice.
13:12:15 thanks everybody for hanging out. I am a light-skinned.
13:12:21 Northern European woman, with long, blonde, dark blonde, wavy hair, lanky build, and I am multiply disabled.
13:12:35 I have a cranio-facial disability, and legally blind. I'm deaf in my right ear, and I also
13:12:44 I have cleft palate scars cleft lip scars around my mouth.
13:12:51 I'm wearing a black and white polka dot shirt, blouse today.
13:12:55 So, okay, so let's see what we have here.
13:13:10 So these are 2, I mean, just from the criptech metaverse lab event that we just did in February of this year.
13:13:22 It's we. By Metaverse we mean the metaverse like, not branded by Facebook, the metaverse.
13:13:32 Actually, it is a term. This is just a general term that refers to virtual reality, and it was coined like way back into like late eighties and early nineties, to refer to virtual reality worlds in general.
13:13:50 So we were just trying to, you know. Wrest it back from, you know.
13:13:54 Mark Zuckerberg, in using the terminology and in cripping.
13:14:01 You know virtual reality. So it was a 3 day event, and
13:14:09 I am one of the 2 researchers and residents, along with Frank Mandelli, who's starting as a assistant professor
13:14:23 of the history of technology at University of Delaware.
13:14:28 So we were originally at this weekend's events that were hosted at Gray Area in San Francisco.
13:14:38 That's together with Leonardo, there are 2 art and technology focused organizations seeking to support artists who are working
13:14:52 In those 2 realms. So the images in front of you now are 2 of our the artists that we selected for our cohort of artists to try to, our goal is to get more artists disabled artists into positions of influencing and
13:15:18 and really important roles within the tech industry.
13:15:26 And in particular, virtual reality, because we've come a long way with accessibility and aesthetic access in terms of the fine arts and in terms of computer operating systems.
13:15:40 And smartphones, and all of that, but we have not yet been able to integrate accessibility and aesthetic access into virtual reality.
13:15:53 Spaces or hardware. So the artist, the artist on the left is a tall oh, maybe fifties year old.
13:16:04 African American dancer. His name's Antoine Hunter.
13:16:10 He's based in the Bay area, and he is a dance instructor and choreographer.
13:16:16 He's in this image. He is in the world that's called Maestro, and he's checking out this new headset, and it's actually a very visual.
13:16:33 It's a very visual game that's based on the orchestra.
13:16:39 So you're actually conducting an orchestra.
13:16:44 But it's done with sort of like guitar hero.
13:16:45 It's has a lot of visual cues.
13:16:48 So Antoine as a deaf artist was, or a deaf person was really a gamer.
13:16:56 was really getting into it. And the way the game works is you have to sort of use your like.
13:17:06 The conductors wand to keep time for the orchestra, but has these visual cues that come down, and you're supposed to keep the time but they're very visually kind of fine maneuvers.
13:17:23 So our artist on the right is Maya Scott.
13:17:27 She's a blind artist performance artist, based in the Bay area, and so that didn't work at all for her.
13:17:36 And she really had a very, very different experience of access with the technology
13:17:46 With this game, and with the headset, which is quite large for her.
13:17:51 She's a very, and with the headset, which is quite large for her, she's a maybe below 5 feet tall woman, and she's blind.
13:18:00 She has some vision. So as a performance artist
13:18:09 She sort of just started improvising and just sort of moving around the space and trying to use instead of using the the fine motor like point shoot and stuff that requires you to have really good vision.
13:18:24 She was just using her head to move around the space, and she's also holding the device in it like not.
13:18:33 She wasn't working for her, because the the strap that that goes around your wrist to help you hold onto the bar or the controller.
13:18:44 It was so large that it would just slide right off of her, so, as you can see, these devices are still being made for, like, you know, able-bodied men right?
13:18:53 so we can go onto the next slide.
13:18:56 Okay. Oh, hang on, let's see if I can. There!
13:18:58 So that's a very fast, you know, overview
13:19:04 You can look for Criptech Metaverse, you can search for it.
13:19:10 So we're going to be doing some announcements about it soon.
13:19:14 We're actually one of the tech that the headset, the maker of the headsets is sponsoring two of our artists to create worlds creative. Let's see.
13:19:29 So like pitches for 2 diverse worlds.
13:19:34 So they're going to be working on that over the summer, and then
13:19:40 We'll be presenting that over the summer at great area as part of their virtual reality festival, that's all taking part taking place in San Francisco.
13:19:54 So this is an image. This is my work, this is my artwork from recoding criptech, and Jillian Crochet is also in that show.
13:20:05 This is called the the foot notice the foot when it touches.
13:20:09 Hey? I have to read it. Sorry. Okay.
13:20:13 The foot knows the foot when it touches the earth, and that is a quote attributed to the Buddha.
13:20:21 But the Buddha never really said it. Nobody really knows where it came from, but, similar to Jessica.
13:20:28 I find I like to use really lyrical.
13:20:31 Titles, and it really spoke to this piece.
13:20:35 It's, to describe it. There are 3 wooden pallets, and they're filled with earth and different colored moss, like bright green and dark green.
13:20:48 And red moss, and there are several scattered throughout.
13:20:57 These beds are 3D Prints of of animal tracks, like pigs and chickens, and deer, and different hoof prints, and the entire thing is wired to tactile transducers, and the tactile transducers are
13:21:20 wired to streaming audio of music from Americana, like bluegrass and blues, and I chose this playlist that's very percussive.
13:21:34 So the tactile transducers would amplify the sound, and they would shake the entire pallets, and make the make the moss and the the earth kind of shake, and so the smell of the earth would sort of waft up.
13:21:58 As people were walking around the piece, and it's designed to make just a more, it sort of reaches out to you.
13:22:09 Physically. It went through these like pulses of of vibratory sound, right?
13:22:17 And then in the background, you can see a little bit of Darren Martin's piece.
13:22:30 But it's a virtual reality piece that's shown on the wall.
13:22:34 So, I'm sort of harkening to virtual reality.
13:22:37 Again, there was a really great installation that you just seem to.
13:22:42 Really, it's they look like two really verdant landscapes.
13:22:45 that sort of flow into each other. So I tend to mention it when I'm describing it.
13:22:53 So for this piece I was really interested in speaking about my colonial migration as a like California transplant.
13:23:03 so that was the source material for the work.
13:23:11 But all of my work, I have a real commitment to making it, you know, multi sensory and accessible for the disabled community.
13:23:24 So I tried to make the pallets at wheelchair height
13:23:32 Measure everything out so that wheelchairs can go around the space and fit comfortably, and I want to have a lot of aural qualities.
13:23:43 A lot of smell and tactile qualities. So
13:23:48 It was really fun to watch people sort of touch the beds, of these foreign objects, and sort of, you know, play with the tactile footprints, and just listen to the vibratory sound.
13:24:05 So we can go onto the next slide.
13:24:22 Okay, so this is Buckets of Rain.
13:24:26 And this is a wood turned lathe piece.
13:24:32 It is a mobile, and it hangs from the ceiling.
13:24:35 It's wooden raindrops of different sizes, and it's all suspended by a rusty found bucket rim.
13:24:51 So it was found on site, where I was making these, where I was carving these raindrops.
13:25:03 And so it came together like that. I have a lot more to say about that piece, but for the sake of time you can always get on my website.
13:25:12 Jennifer dash justice.com and read more about it, and then we can go onto the last slide.
13:25:18 And this is also on my website. And this is a tactile map of the Klamath Restoration project in Northern California.
BERT:
13:25:35 Yeah, and is that permanently installed?
13:25:38 Somewhere?
JENNIFER:
13:25:40 It's not currently installed anywhere.
13:26:08 So these dam removal projects are very slow moving. So the haven't, it's probably not gonna happen for a really long time.
13:26:16 But I created the map based on public lidar technology that's made available by the local tribes, they've been given this area back after you know, hundreds and hundreds of years.
13:26:38 So, not only are they managing the reclamation of the site, they're also in charge of the the data and the technology, the lidar mapping of the site. as the dams come down, the water will expand, and so the blue is the current water.
13:27:01 the blue sections of the map show the you know what's there now, and then the gray will be an expansion of the water supply available for the area.
13:27:14 So and then, as you can see in the other image, and this it's in the northeast, and all of and all of that water will flow down to the southwest, and in this land it is just going to expand.
13:27:27 Really restore the whole river basin down there, which is a mess, it's like over a few counties.
13:27:38 It's a really huge amount of land.
BERT:
13:27:40 Wow, yeah, I hadn't really understood all that when when I saw this on your site.
13:27:46 That's super cool. Wow.
13:27:48 Yeah, so, thank you, everybody.
13:27:56 Oh, I'm still sharing. Stop share. Okay, thank you so much, Jennifer.
13:28:00 That that was great, and thank you, everyone, for being so gracious with my tech problems.
13:28:08 And everything that's kind of requiring patience with me.
13:28:14 But everyone's been so so gracious. Thank you very much for this.
13:28:18 These fabulous talks. I'm scrolling through the chat and seeing,
13:28:28 People are sharing some thoughts so I don't see any immediate questions.
13:28:35 If anybody is in the zoom room or in the actual room, interested in posing a question or making a comment, possibly addressing multiple artists, please feel free to do so, and I can I can voice that if it's in the room and my mic.
13:28:55 Doesn't really pick up what you have to say, and I'll keep my eye on the chat here. If anybody wants to ask a question in the chat.
13:29:06 And I can also, I can also wing it for people who are still here.
JILLIAN:
13:29:17 This is Jillian speaking, I'll throw out a question.
13:29:24 Em, I was wondering. Your pieces are so small and delicate that I mean, I haven't actually seen them in person.
13:29:42 But from looking at them. I would be scared to even pick them up, and like that precocity as somebody with a mobility disability, like I'm wobbly and drop things, and I'm just fascinated with the teeny tiny weavings- does mobility stuff factor in for
13:30:11 you when making or thinking about the work?
EM:
13:30:15 Yeah. Hi, Jillian, this is Em speaking. Thanks so much.
13:30:21 Yeah, it definitely does. I also have a mobility disability.
13:30:26 And, in fact, through the process, through my own process, that I created, it's kind of treacherous even for me, I often am like dropping them or bumping them and pieces fall off.
13:30:37 But I really wanted to work this way, and I was having a lot of fun making the weaving.
13:30:44 So conceptually, that became kind of related for me to the bodies I was making into my own body, where parts might break or appear to be broken.
13:30:55 But then they're reinforced through the process of weaving.
13:30:58 So they're actually a bit more sturdy than they appear.
13:31:02 There's many layers of woven, it's almost like how you make like a coil basket.
13:31:07 So each of the limbs are bound, almost like there's casts around them.
13:31:14 And so, yeah, by just like putting layers and layers of weaving, they actually become somewhat sturdy.
13:31:21 But it is a thing, I like fragility to sort of be communicated through the objects when people are near them.
13:31:29 So I think that you're, even having not maybe been with them in person.
13:31:33 I think you're absolutely right to say that there's this sort of precarious quality to them, because they're so small and slight and made with material that is just known for being breakable you know, like porcelain plates.
13:31:48 So, yeah, I think that's true. And I do think a lot about that.
JILLIAN:
13:31:51 Thank you.
13:31:54 I love that, and that the weaving like is a way to mend them, and enforce and might support them.
13:32:03 And also like, yeah, that we all have had tiny figurines that like lose an ear, or whatever.
EM:
13:32:12 Well, I really love your mending work as well I'm not as fast as coming up with questions.
13:32:17 I was just like nodding a lot when you were speaking, especially about that process of you know, sort of remaking the pieces over and over as time goes on, and they sort of almost like the ship of Theseus, like they sort of change, and become new based on people's interactions with them and that makes
13:32:37 me think of how you know we move through the world, too.
BERT:
13:32:44 So many interesting layers of intimate, almost like intra personal, like bodily, different parts of the body, for so many of your works.
13:32:57 And then some of it's so public, and interfacing with, you know, ableist and normative culture.
13:33:04 And then and other, you know, disabled communities and communities of care, all at the same time.
13:33:10 And there's so many of those networks happening in in these pieces.
13:33:18 Does anybody. I have kind of one thought that could be like the last thing we talk about, but if people have any questions to share in the room, or we have 3 people besides me, in case you're wondering- that I can.
13:33:37 See in the physical room, but more people in the zoom.
13:33:45 Leaving a pause for anybody who wants to interject. Okay?
13:33:49 So just a thing that if people want to just comment on this, the thing that ties all the work.
13:33:58 And Alex had to go, but I think their work as well in in a different way. Particularly they're kind of work around rest, like all of you seem to be mapping bodies, oh I think Jessica had to go too.
13:34:15 But I think everyone's work was mapping bodies in a way that's you know.
13:34:20 Not at all standardized, not at all isometric or, there's a anthropometric, that's a term for how architects design space for normatively sized and mobile people, and all of your work
13:34:41 abstracts the body in this like super smart, meaningful way.
13:34:47 So I wonder if anybody has any thoughts about bodies and mapping, and if that resonates, or if you see any connections with between your work and other people who presented, or maybe people who aren't here, but whose work, you wanna lift up
13:35:06 spark any thoughts for anybody.
13:35:15 Maybe a kinship that you feel with another artist kind of the way Jillian and Em were connecting.
EM:
13:35:29 I can really quickly cause, I think I talked too much.
13:35:33 But I'll just really quickly, so that I really like that.
13:35:36 read of things and if I'm understanding it, right, body mapping to me is something where you sort of map your body onto your environment or onto other folks who help prop you up, like that's something that kind of resonates from what you're saying.
13:35:51 And I also saw a lot of that in the work presented today.
13:35:55 I'm thinking also of Emilie, with their companion dog, and just animals, and nature that we become more connected with, based on how we move through the world or based on yeah, these, like, I think it's like actor network, these networks that were a piece and part
13:36:16 of, and that seemed to be sort of a shared impulse among at least what people were stressing in their presentations.
BERT:
13:36:30 Thanks Em. I like, I, I sort of label my blog, at least for the moment.
13:36:37 I mean we'll see, as an anti ableist gesture, I feel like anti racism has gotten so tainted by corporate misuse.
13:36:46 Now that it's hard to to even say that seriously.
13:36:50 But I feel like, at least as an idea
13:36:53 I want to like, think about that, and that redefining bodies is something that all everyone's doing.
13:37:00 I think in not just, as you know, motionless things in space, but also as motion and capacity in time, and between other bodies.
13:37:12 And so that seems to have a lot of potential For you know, small scale and large scale resistance.
13:37:20 And I really like that and of course it's, you know, beautiful and contemplative.
13:37:24 It doesn't have to be political and active in all the time in every way.
13:37:29 But I think there's a lot of that potential as well.
13:37:32 And I just wanna thank you for all of you,
13:37:36 and many people who aren't here who we're in the meeting or not in the meeting, for all your work kind of doing that, or like at least thinking about it and making it more legible to, you know, the world of people who understand bodies and very restricted ways. So that's kind
13:37:56 of a good, maybe meandering point for me to leave off on.
13:38:02 I really, really, really appreciate everyone's time who appreciate everyone who supported the event came to the event.
13:38:08 All the artists who have agreed to be part of this, and have been on the blog.
13:38:13 I hope people will take a look at institutional model.
13:38:16 It's a Wix site. I should really get a better URL for it.
13:38:21 But I'm happy to share the link with anybody. But please feel free to contact me.
13:38:24 I'm I'll put my contact in the chat real quick I'm astable@ilstu.edu
13:38:36 And yeah, the institutional model. I might be able to find it.
13:38:41 Anybody else find it really quickly, because it's it's less easy to find than you'd think if I if I do this here we go.
13:38:50 I found it. My screen memory. Oh, you're fast! There's there's that one, too, so there's a couple of them.
13:39:01 Yeah, that's the one. Yeah. Em just posted the link to last year's symposium.
13:39:06 which reminds me to restate that this symposium will also be documented.
13:39:12 I'm gonna correct the transcript which is gonna be full of problems.
13:39:16 But I'm glad to have it, and I will work with that and post a video hopefully
13:39:24 Within a month, and Jillian's post will be up soon, so please keep an eye out for that.
13:39:29 Please look at the posts for all the other awesome artists who have been on there, including folks from this year, and folks from last year as well, and please be in touch with me.
13:39:38 If anybody has any interest in discussing any of this stuff further, in doing projects around these kinds of issues and examples that people have provided with their fabulous work and and lives and ideas.
13:39:53 So I can leave it there. Thank you, and hope to talk to many of you again soon, and have a wonderful afternoon or evening, wherever you are, whatever time of day it is.
13:40:07 Thanks, everybody.
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