Location
Today’s session will be located at Kline Tower. You can access maps to the building through our Google Drive folder.
Schedule
Overview
This session features a curated display of artwork created by artists whose work explores themes of disability, access, and lived experience. Through a variety of artistic mediums, the session invite viewers to reflect on how disability shapes identity, creativity, community, and the design of our shared spaces.
Artists
Here are the artists and their works that will be featured.
Samuel Dunetz, Larrin
The work is a comic format about the working day adventures for Larrin, a NYC taxi driver who lives with his parents. The artist Samuel Dunetz draws his comics in Photoshop. Samuel fills the frames with interesting details and facial expressions that make his work endearing and enjoyable to look at. During his day, Larrin stops for a woman in a wheelchair. Because his taxi is wheelchair accessible, Larrin can help her into his cab and drive her to her daughter’s house. This reminds us how important wheelchair accessibility is to people’s happiness and freedom to travel.
Zach Sundborg, These Stairs Are Broken
In an effort to enhance accessibility, a temporary ramp is installed over an existing stairway, blocking a deliberate path upward through the steps. It is elegant and confrontational. It disrupts the bodily assumptions embedded in neoclassical formality. It irritates the Quarenghi purists. It is unmistakably orange. This speculative intervention enables wheelchair access while exposing the limits of “inclusion” in historic architecture. It is temporary by necessity, political by intent. Rather than quietly accommodating, it insists on being seen, forcing an encounter with exclusion and the institutions and their architecture have long refused.
Farrah Garland
Photo photographed by Chris Zupp, model and concept designer Farrah. “A photograph of me suspended in my wheelchair, with a sword. It’s a powerful piece reflecting the joy, beauty, ferocity, and freedom that I find in my wheelchair.”
Oi Fortin, Masquerade
“Masquerade originates from a deeply personal moment following the passing of my mother-in-law last year. She was the eyes for my father-in-law, who is color blind. She set out his clothes every day. After her passing, I took it upon myself to coordinate his closet at the assisted living facility so he wouldn’t have to struggle with choosing what to wear. Color blindness is an invisible disability. In my father-in-law’s case, he cannot see red or green colors, so vital in everyday life, especially for driving. I often wonder how he managed all these years, and though he no longer drives, I can’t imagine what it must be like to live without seeing these essential colors. This piece reflects that experience—the navigation of a world where colors hold different meanings and the quiet strength required to move through it.”
Chanika Svetvilas, Pharma Infinity Dance
Pharma Infinity Dance, 2022, video, 1.51 min.
Chanika Svetvilas’ interdisciplinary art practice focuses on the diversity of the lived experience of mental health difference, and the impact of the stigma and inequity of access to care. In her work, she utilizes an archive of medication guides, prescription bottles, historical and psychiatric resource materials that reflect mental health conditions and systemic and historical legacies to find strength in vulnerability. In this performative video short, Svetvilas dances with her sculpture, “Pharma Infinity,” a collection of her prescription bottles threaded with galvanized wire in the shape of an infinity symbol. Created with a smartphone, she films herself from above like a security camera as she dances down the aisles of a pharmacy to reflect on side effects, the intersections of treatment, access, and stigma as well as their contradictions. Her work is informed by her personal experiences as someone with a diagnosis of bipolar. This film has been presented at film festivals including RestFest and NeuroCinema Berlin.
Laura Forlano, Human in the Loop
Human in the Loop (Alert Blanket, Talking Pillows and Sleepless Pajamas):
This project illustrates the way that current medical AI systems–wearable technologies for people with non-normative bodies–claim to fix the body at the expense of degrading the mind. Drawing on nearly 15 years of experience from “disabled cyborg” life as a Type 1 diabetic, this project showcases the unique pleasures and harms of living with these systems through an installation that raises questions about human-machine power asymmetries, agency, control and surveillance when technology is enmeshed into our bodies and nestled into our bedrooms. Here, amidst pillows, blankets and pajamas, a “smart” pancreas needs round the clock care, causing extreme sleep deprivation and disrupting the most intimate realms of our lives–our routines of rest and renewal–as well as those of our partners. Rather than far oN speculative futures, this project suggests that “bodymind control” is already here. If we cannot sleep, we cannot dream!
Isaac Jean Francois, Sound Therapy
Evan Ericson, Where the Light Comes to Rest
A Design Project for The Nest Collab
For me, the word “nest” conjures up the image of a window nook filled with light, a place of calm, comfort, and possibility. Inside that space are trappings of the familiar – a coffee cup, books, a cat – while the window lets in hints of the outside world, its warm sunlight like strands of hope. Even if for whatever reason one can’t physically leave their home, a lot of life is still right there.
Madison Visionary, Stim Well: Heart Art
Idea Avenue (Oil on canvas, 2023)
This piece was created out of a sense of deep, and lasting loneliness. I tried to put those emotions into this piece. It describes how I often feel misunderstood and alone even when around others. The wide open, dripping emptiness is what this encapsulates.
Dark Dayze! (Oil and Watercolor on canvas, 2025)
While making this piece, I was having a very bad day. I created this in an urgent moment feeling, “I must paint right now!”, and so I did. I see this piece as emotions swirling like a tornado.
Josephine Sales, Color Correction (Tell Me Tell Me) 2016
Playing from 2-2:10 pm
Color Correction (Tell Me Tell Me) (2016) is a single-channel video that begins with a field of color through a circular mask, then shifts to a full field of color; a recurring question—“tell me what the issue is?”—structures an exchange between two disembodied voices.
Photosensitivity Warning: This video contains flashing light and color that may affect viewers with photosensitivity or photosensitive epilepsy.
1:55 pm- 2 pm: Opening Remarks
2-2:30 pm: Comedy with Crystal Emery
Crystal Emery, guest opener Elizabeth Lalor
2:30-2:50 pm: The Paradox of Hypervisibility: Disabled Dancers and the Politics of the Gaze
Meggie Boyle
This will be a pre-recorded presentation.
Disabled people exist in a paradox: visually conspicuous yet politically erased. When disabled dancers take the stage, imposed visibility transforms into chosen display – what Ann Cooper Albright calls ‘a radical space’ where we reclaim the weaponised gaze. Through dance, we invert the historical legacy of the freak show, inviting audiences into new modes of perceiving disabled embodiment as sites of creativity, virtuosity, and aesthetic innovation, authoring our own narratives rather than being written by others.
2:50-3:10 pm: A Litany of (Mad) Saints: How sanctified bodyminds challenge contemporary Catholicism
Elliott Barnhill
In many Catholic notions of personhood, one’s sanity is a measure of one’s humanity. Catholic Christians continue to venerate saints who defy today’s behavioral norms. In this paper I show the transformative possibilities of claiming these saints as Mad, engaging the texts of medieval disability studies and Catholic social teaching. By using the lenses of disability and Madness to anachronistically reinterpret the non-normative bodyminds of saints, we realize the importance of our othered community members.
3:10-3:20 pm: Break
3:20-3:40 pm: “You Don’t Need that Cane”: Narratives of Disability Inside Jail Walls
Harley Pomper, Micah Clark Moody, Manu S. Sundaresan
When people are jailed, the narrative authority for what is “disability” lies with the jailers. In this presentation, we will draw from a community archive to contrast state narratives of disability, agency, and punishment with testimony from jailed people unmediated by legal proceedings.
3:40-4 pm: Disfluency as Protection: Stutters and State Surveillance
June Kramer
“Disfluency as Protection: Stutters and State Surveillance” takes inspiration from JJJJJerome Ellis, Saidiya Hartman, unnamed ancestors, and any resistance to violence of the state. June is exploring how history repeats itself repeets itself repeats itslef repeats itself.
4-4:30 pm: Q&A/Discussion
Moderator: Emmett Lockwood
Food and refreshments are available. Come celebrate the end of the Symposium!