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Direct Funding means freedom for many people with disabilities. Is it accessible enough?

Direct Funding allows people with disabilities in Canada to hire and manage their own staff, giving them control over their schedules and lives. But the wait list is as long as a year.

 

CUAG and The Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies invite you to Cripping Aesthetics, Maddening Creation with Lindsay Eales and Danielle Peers. This is the first event in CUAG’s new Disruptions: Dialogues on Disability Art series, curated by Michael Orsini to generate dialogue about contemporary art as a force for challenging ableism.

The event takes place from 7:00 - 9:00 p.m., Tuesday, 27 February, in Room 372, Residence Commons Building, located on Campus Avenue at Carleton University. Admission is free and everyone is welcome! Light refreshments will be provided.

In this presentation, Lindsay Eales and Danielle Peers dance a quartet with disability and madness. They draw together critical disability and Mad theory, spoken word, dance performance, and film. They weave these forms into critical reflections on representations of disability and madness in the arts, access to the arts, and the generative possibilities of cripping and maddening the arts. The presentation will be followed by a discussion with Lindsay and Danielle.

For more information on the use of terms ‘Mad’ and ‘Crip’ to describe theory, art, and political movements, see this brilliant introduction by Jenna Reid:https://canadianart.ca/features/cripping-arts-time/

Lindsay Eales is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport and Recreation at the University of Alberta who studies disability, madness and dance. She is the Co-Artistic Director of CRIPSiE (the Collaborative Radically Integrated Performers Society) in Edmonton, which centres dance by and for people experiencing disability as well as their artistic and political allies. She has choreographed and performed integrated dance for 10 years. Her Masters research focused on practices and performances of social justice in integrated dance. Her PhD research is on Madness and performance art. For her research-creation work weaving together critical disability studies, Mad studies and dance, she has been awarded the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC), the Alberta Arts Graduate Scholarship, and the Alberta Award for the Study of Human Rights and Multiculturalism.

Danielle Peers is a community organizer, artist and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport and Recreation at the University of Alberta. Danielle uses critical disability and poststructuralist theories to study disability movement cultures: from the Paralympics, to inclusive recreation, to disability arts. Their research builds on their experiences as a Paralympian, filmmaker and dancer with CRIPSiE (Collaborative Radically Integrated Performers Society) in Edmonton. Danielle is the Director of the Media in Motion Lab, which supports creative methods for producing and sharing knowledges about human bodies in motion.

Michael Orsini is Professor in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. He is co-editor (with Christine Kelly) of Mobilizing Metaphor: Art, Culture and Disability Activism in Canada (UBC Press, 2016). He is currently part of a SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant, Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life, which explores how activist art can be mobilized to promote social justice and an appreciation for diverse minds and bodies.

Access
Residence Commons 372 is a barrier-free room accessed by an elevator. ASL interpretation will be provided. Service animals are welcome. Please help us make this a scent-free environment.

Disability accommodations
Should you have any disability-related requirements, please contact Victoria by 13 February at [email protected] or (613) 520-2600, ext. 2929.

Directions
The event takes place on the third floor of Residence Commons, an accessible building located on Campus Avenue. The closest bus stop is 6612; the next closest is 5813. The closest Para Transpo stop is 19. The closest accessible parking spots (two) are across Campus Avenue, called P17.

Parking
CUAG will sell discount parking passes ($4.00 flat rate) for this event. Drive up to the tunnel entrance, near Leeds House residence. A CUAG staff member will be standing just inside the tunnel. Purchase a hang tang for your rear-view mirror and park anywhere in the nearby P18 parkade. Please see the visiting page for directions.

This event is generously supported by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, School for Studies in Art and Culture, READ Initiative, Paul Menton Centre, Carleton Disability Awareness Centre, Graduate Students Association, Carleton University Students Association.



A statement by curator Michael Orsini on the Disruptions: Dialogues on Disability Art series:

Disability disrupts. Art disrupts. Disruptions are disturbances, problems, perturbations.

This speakers’ series seeks to disrupt some of the conversations happening in the worlds of disability arts, in arts communities new to the field of disability art and in disability communities.

Engaging with disability art means bringing at least three things into focus:

1. It generates dialogue about art as a force for challenging ableism 
2. It challenges the boundaries separating contemporary art from disability experience
3. It identifies multiple, intersecting oppressions that exist at the heart of artistic expression

Disruptions, then, can be generative spaces. Thinking anew about disability art helps us to confront the pitying, charity-filled narratives of disability that circulate in popular culture. As Eliza Chandler, a professor of disability studies at Ryerson University explains, foregrounding a disability aesthetic “[invites] us to be satiated by the differences disability brings. If you as the audience are compelled, intrigued, interested, curious or made uncomfortable by it [disability art], then that changes understanding and can lead us from tolerating disabled people to desiring.”

In curating Disruptions, I hope this series works to mess with our assumptions about art, about disability and about the ways in which disability art disrupts regularly scheduled arts programming.

Carleton University Art Gallery
St. Patrick's Building
http://cuag.ca/
@CUArtGallery

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