PostScript

PostScript

Project Artists: Hannah Bullock, Rachel Gray, Noa/h Fields and Stefania Gomez, Christine Wu

This commissioning and exhibition project is the final part of PostScript, an online series of sessions on disability, accessibility, and digital publishing every Friday in October 2020, organized by Public Access. Four projects created by disabled artists have been curated in partnership with Tangled Art + Disability exploring the concepts of disability, access, and publishing from a range of perspectives and modes. In addition to public presentation and discussion of the works, they will be exhibited accessibly online and in a special issue of PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas that will include accessible digital features. 

Curator Biographies 

Sean Lee is an artist and curator exploring the notion of disability art and accessibility as the last avant-garde. His methodology reframes embodied difference as a means to resist traditional aesthetic idealities. Orienting towards a “crip horizon,” Sean gestures towards the transformative possibilities of a world that desires the way disability can disrupt. Sean holds a B.A. in Arts Management and Studio from the University of Toronto, Scarborough and is currently the Director of Programming at Tangled Art + Disability. Previous to this role, he was Tangled’s inaugural Curator in Residence (2016) as well as Tangled’s Gallery Manager (2017). Sean was involved with the launch of Tangled Art Gallery, and has been integral to countless exhibitions and public engagements throughout his tenure at Tangled Art + Disability. In addition to his position at Tangled, Sean is an independent curator, lecturer, and advisor, adding his insights and perspectives to conversations surrounding Disability Arts across Canada and the United States. Sean currently sits on the board of CARFAC Ontario, Creative Users Projects and is a member of the Ontario Art Council’s Deaf and Disability Advisory Committee and Toronto Art Council’s Visual and Media Arts Committee. 

Mary Bunch is Canada Research Chair in Vision, Disability and the Arts (Tier II), Assistant Professor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University and founding director of the Peripheral Visions Lab. She is a core member of VISTA, Vision Science to Applications and a Research Associate of Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology. Dr. Bunch’s interests include interdisciplinary disability, queer, decolonial and feminist theory, XR arts and media arts philosophy. She works at the intersection of the political imagination and its visual / sensory expressions. Her current project on Ecstatic Freedom engages theoretical, activist, and arts epistemologies as these re-envision the forms that democratic participation, political belonging and justice take. She has published articles in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability StudiesFeminist TheoryCulture, Theory and Critique; and the Canadian Journal of Human Rights. Dr. Bunch has taught at McGill University, the University of Toronto and Western University. 

Julia Chan is writer, artist, and academic living in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in JoylandsubTerrainCosmonauts AvenueLitroNY, and others, and has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council. Her film work has screened at festivals such as Sundance and ImagineNATIVE, and she won Best Short Screenplay at the International Cherokee Film Festival. Her photography and video work have been exhibited at the Tett Centre and Queen’s University. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University at Kingston and an MFA in Screenwriting from York University. Her doctoral research—which explored the connections between image-based sexual abuse, surveillance, and cinematic/visual cultures—was supported by a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, an Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and a SSHRC Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement. Her academic work has been published in Porn Studies and is forthcoming in the edited collection Screening #MeToo: Rape Culture in Hollywood (SUNY Press). Currently, she is a Mitacs Postdoctoral Visitor in Cinema and Media Arts at York University and the Managing Editor of the biannual art journal PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas

Artist Biographies

Hannah Bullock is an artist and writer based in Toronto, Ontario. Her work draws upon her own experience with chronic pain: exploring representations of the body as it relates to illness, intimacy and physical labour. Hannah graduated from the printmaking program at OCAD University in 2018, and is currently pursuing her Master’s of Fine Arts at York University. In her current artistic practice, Hannah has been questioning her own internalized ableism by re-evaluating her choice in processes to meet her own access needs. Her current artwork involves performative drawing practice, and explores technology as a form of prosthesis.

Stefania Gomez is a queer writer, audio maker, and teaching artist from Chicago’s South Side. She has published work in The Offing, the Missouri Review, and Sinking City Review. She is the author of the chapbook ONCE I LOVED A COWBOY (Ghost City Press, 2019) and was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She works at the Poetry Foundation, where she facilitates poetry workshops for the public, especially young people. 

Noa/h Fields is a trans writer and teaching artist who wears hearing aids. They have written for Sixty InchesFilthy DreamsElectronic BeatsAnomalous Press, and Scapi Magazine, among other publications. They composed music and lyrics for the disability-centered musical Transplant and also wrote a poetry chapbook, WITH (Ghost City Press, 2018). Since meeting at Brown in a poetry workshop with Mónica de la Torre, Noa/h and Stefania both relocated to Chicago, where they founded the experimental queer poetry collective De.composition. Through this collaboration they have produced workshops, publications, and events around Chicago. De.composition’s mission is to upend the elite and inaccessible institutions that house poetry by fostering and celebrating poets and poetics on the fringe. 

Rachel Gray is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist. She holds a BA in English Literature from King’s College and a BFA from the University of Ottawa. Navigating the world with Dyslexia has led her to explore art as a way to create customized language, and alternative forms of expression. Her work tries to speak into the places language leaves blank. Her projects have been exhibited at City Hall Art Gallery (Ottawa), General Assembly (Ottawa), Blackhouse (Montreal) and, most recently, in the AIRIE Nest Gallery as part of a residency in the Everglades National Park (Florida). In 2017, she launched the first section of her graphic novel Jess, and is continuing this project as an artist in residence at the Ottawa School of Art. Rachel is also the Artistic Director at BEING Studio, a community of artists with developmental disabilities. She is currently working on the studio’s first podcast series Speak

Christine Wu is a Hong Kong-born filmmaker and cultural worker currently living on Williams Treaties territory (Whitchurch-Stouffville, Ontario, Canada). She creates from a place of self-compassion, reflecting her ongoing process of self-education about systemic injustice, healing and collective liberation.  Christine recently completed her BFA in Film Production at York University. Her experimental and documentary short films have been screened with Tkaronto/Toronto’s Pleasure Dome, Breakthroughs Film Festival, Toronto Queer Film Festival, Ethnografilm Festival, Wunderground Film Festival and Ghent Viewpoint Documentary Film Festival. 

More projects in partnership with Public Access, Tangled Arts and Disability