CUAG and The Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies invite you to “How to Do Things with Disability Aesthetics,” a talk by Kevin Gotkin. This is the second event in CUAG’s “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 at CUAG from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 20 November.

Admission is free and everyone is welcome! Light refreshments will be provided.

In this talk, Kevin Gotkin charts some possibilities for disability aesthetics, and the protocols that emerge from artmaking that refuses to crystallize within imaginations of the typical. We start with a view of ableism as it is entrenched in the civic realm: through the entanglement of public endurance rituals (marathons and other -thons), neoliberal non-profit and charity industrial complexes, and fantasies about the end of disability. Then we trace the ways that disability aesthetics (in and out of artist communities that claim the identity) have resisted and reimagined these cultural phenonema.

We tour the disability arts scene in New York City, including recent activist projects that deploy the aesthetics of disability in cultural policy, programming, and activist training. Finally, we imagine the future of disability aesthetics at work, thinking specifically about world-making in an accessible nightlife dream-to-be.

Kevin Gotkin is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture & Communication at New York University. In 2018, he completed his dissertation, “The Marathon and On: Disability, Endurance, Aspiration,” at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2016, he co-founded Disability/Arts/NYC (DANT) with Simi Linton.

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.

Image Description
A seated white man with a beard speaks into a microphone he holds in one hand. His other hand is in a fist, mid-sentence. He wears a blue beanie, blue pants, and a sweater with an array of colors that looks almost like a glitch TV screen.

Access
CUAG is a barrier-free space, with accessible washrooms nearby and an elevator in the lobby to access both floors. 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 10 November at victoria.mcglinchey@carleton.ca or (613) 520-2600, ext. 2929.

Directions
The event takes place at Carleton University Art Gallery, an accessible space located in the St. Patrick’s Building at the north end of campus. The closest bus stop is 6612; the next closest is 5813. The closest Para Transpo stop is 20.

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.

There are four accessible parking spots in the roundabout near Leeds House residence. To park in one of these spots, purchase a $4.00 discount parking pass, described above, and ask for an additional (free) permit.

This event is generously supported by The Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender 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 and the 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.”

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