Elizabeth Sweeney

connections

Articles, interviews and discussions by others who connect with my work

Connection: curating

SLIPPAGE: The Unstable Nature Of Difference curated by Lesley Halliwell and Jo Thorne

This exhibition brings together a group of national and international Artists who work with a range of media including photography, film, sculpture, performance and drawing. All the work in the exhibition explores our understanding of what it means to be human; an awareness of difference has the ability to expand boundaries and engender new ways of thinking about our relationships to one another and our experience of embodiment.

CONNECTIONS: WRITING, CURATING, OPINIONS

Diversity Dilemma: Obstacles in engagement and Representation by Kaylee Maddison, Feature article, MUSE magazine, Canadian Museums Association, July/ August 2015

"Art is a natural outlet to showcase unique perspectives, Opions and creative diversity. There is no one material, size, shape or colour that must be used. But diversity in art stretches beyond the tactile elements we immediately see to the artist, the place and time of creation, as well as the curator and how it is displayed"

CONNECTIONS: CURATING, WRITING

‘disabling’ the museum: Curator as infrastructural activist by Amanda Cachia,  University of California,  Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 12 Number 3 ) pp. 257–289 

Abstract This article will explore how I attempt to ‘disable’ the museum through my infrastructural curatorial practice, which is the basis for my scholarly research and writing. By infusing my curatorial projects with critical reflection and theoretical development, I hope to begin this process of building a new vocabulary and methodology around curating disability and access. Specifically, I will focus on the exhibitions and related projects I have initiated and organized in the past three years to demonstrate a number of critical issues surrounding ‘curating disability’. These issues include incorporating discursive programming, establishing access as a creative methodology, taking a sensitive approach towards curating complex attitudes about disability and language, and maintaining sustained engagement with the ethics and practicalities of curating disability-related subject matter. I argue that part of the decolonizing work of disability studies is for curators to start practicing these curatorial strategies in order to ‘crip’ art history and the mainstream contemporary art world. 

Connections: Writing, Curating, Ideas

Disability Arts and Equity in Canada by Michele Decottigines, Features, 165 winter 2016

CONNECTIONS: WRITING, CURATING

Mobilizing Metaphor: Art, Culture and Disability Activism in Canada edited by Christine Kelly, Michael Orsini, UBC Press, 2016

Abstract:

Mobilizing Metaphor illustrates how cultural and artistic efforts are reshaping the contours of disability activism in Canada. The collection explores how artistic or cultural interventions complement and at times complicate the dominant frame of disability organizing, which has focused primarily on the legal and policy spheres at the expense of other sites of activist resistance. In doing so, Mobilizing Metaphor reveals a new wave of disability activism with an ongoing presence that challenges public responses to and representations of disabled people in Canada.

Connections: writing, opinions

Toward a Relational Aesthetic in Disability Art: Interdependence and Crip Futurity  - by Jacqueline White

"Disability art is political and has the power to disrupt normative understandings of disability and disabled life. Through a critical analysis of Lisa Bufano’s (2010) Mentally Fine, I explore various constitutions of disability aesthetics. I argue that we need to push past the binary of ugly and beautiful in our understandings of disability aesthetics and move toward one of unapologetic, proud and embodied difference. "