The Full Light of Day Gallery Guide
On exhibit January 3 - March 14, 2020
If you are interested in requesting accommodations (sensory friendly, audio description, braille, or anything else) to view the show please contact kyle@visualartexchange.org
The Full Light of Day is made possible with support from: Dorothea Dix Park Conservancy, Attenborough Arts Centre, RTI International, and Arts Access
Exhibition Statement
The Full Light of Day features artists with disabilities who are making work that asks the world to acknowledge their lived experience, their bodies, and their minds. They use their creative practices to compel the viewer to have enough respect for them as humans to stop politely ignoring their identities, including their disabilities, and start reckoning with a society that has been built without full input from people with disabilities. Sometimes with beautiful subtlety, these artists are making their art an extension of their self-advocacy, by making their audience see what they otherwise refuse to acknowledge.
The Full Light of Day operates as a place for people with, and without, disabilities to come together in a safe space where discussion and collaboration will foster a better understanding of disability aesthetics and accessibility. Through the engagement of relevant political issues, the challenging of stereotypes, and by shifting focus to the lived experiences of people with disabilities we can move forward in understanding the development of an alternative aesthetic that celebrates difference through the reclamation of the whole self.
As you view the works in this exhibition, reflect on the following questions:
Are the spaces you visit physically accessible?
Are you friends with a person with disabilities?
Have you ever benefitted form universal design? (for example: using a curbcut with a stroller)
Has a decision that directly affected your life ever been made without your input? How did that make you feel?
Do you, your colleagues, or friends still use language like retarded, special, or handicapped? How do you think the artists in this exhibit would respond if they heard you use those words?
ARTISTS
Matt Bodett - Illinois
Rora Blue - California
Aurora Berger - Vermont
Libby Evan - New York
Ari Golub - District of Columbia
Julia McGehean - Pennsylvania
Christopher Samuel - London
Elizabeth Sheeler - Arkansas
STEERING COMMITTEE
Sydney Breslow - Community Inclusion Specialist, Alliance of Disability Advocates
Michelle Davis Petelinz - Artist, arts educator, board chair of Arts Access
Becka Fortune - Communications Coordinator, Disability Rights North Carolina
Ann Fox - Professor of English, Davidson College
Kim Lan Grout - Self-advocate, Director of Marketing and Communications, Jewish Federation of Durham-Chapel Hill
Betsy Ludwig - Executive Director, Arts Access
Alex McArthur - Senior Consultant, Taproot Foundation, Board Chair, National Disability Institute, VAE Raleigh Board Secretary
Carrie Sandahl - Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Disability and Human Development, and Director, Chicago’s Bodies of Work
Patrick Williams - Self-advocate, Inclusion and Diversity Coordinator, LGBT Center of Raleigh
Artist Statements
The following artist statements are shown on the wall next to the artist’s work. The statements below are in order of entering the Lab Gallery with Christopher Samuel’s work and then moving clockwise around the Main Gallery ending with the two works that are in the middle of the space. The works in the middle if the space are in order of closest to the front door first and moving back towards the back wall.
The Lab Gallery
Christopher Samuel
Housing Crisis
London
screenprints
POR
Housing Crisis is a series of prints created from real email exchanges between artist Christopher Samuel, a care company, and a lawyer. In the emails, they talk about the artist’s rights to live independently as a person with disabilities and the laws, which affect his rights to do so. In the creation of the prints, Samuel uses the process of redaction to form powerful statements on equality for one of the most fundamental needs, housing.
In the exhibition, there are ten different emails from the start to the end of an email conversation. In the top row, the artist places an email that has only had sensitive information removed. Directly below this, Samuel puts the same email with his own personal redactions on it. In these versions of the email, he begins to create his own narrative. Here, he uses redaction as a metaphor for how he was removed from the conversation itself.
Housing Crisis tackles the laws surrounding independent housing for people with disabilities, cutbacks in care and the laws around health and care in the UK. Samuel shows us an example of how recent budget cuts have increased the problems people with disabilities face when trying to live independently. He takes these, at times, dehumanizing interactions and reclaims the power by creating poetic statements about perseverance, having a voice, and self-love.Christopher Samuel is a London based artist who works in several different mediums. His work is often based on identity politics and how peoples’ beliefs and political ideas are shaped by the different races, religions or groups they belong to. He uses his own experience to try to explore important ideas which affect all of us. In this exhibition, Samuel focuses on the relationship between people with disabilities and the people who make the laws that impact their lives. This work shown in this exhibition is made possible in partnership with Christopher Samuel, Sam West, the Attenborough Arts Centre, and the Dorothea Dix Park Conservancy.
Main Gallery
Matt Bodett
Poems
Illinois
collages
POR
Matt Bodett's work plays with how we construct realities for ourselves–the objects we use, how we combine them, and how we create meaning by combining them. Bodett says that the schizophrenic mind operates in much the same way as it works to create meaning and significance from disparate elements, though sometimes the outcome is less legible. This work is meant to have some humor which is often an element of life that is not discussed as part of mental illness. Bodett says "people with schizophrenia don't lack humor or any of the other traits which make them just as human as anyone else.
Rora Blue
Chronic Illness Reimagined as Something Glamorous
Libby Evan
Impossible Stairs
New York
chiffon, wooden dowels, embroidery floss
POR
Impossible Stairs reflects a similar sentiment to Scrunchies as this piece applies to Evan’s everyday relationship with stairs while also being site specific. When she lived in Florence, Italy, the elevator in her apartment building had stairs leading to it. Ironically, the assistive technology purpose of the elevator was defeated by the stairs sitting at its entrance. Impossible Stairs precariously hangs to emphasize the fragility of her relationship to a mundane architectural object often taken for granted. Objects become things when they stop functioning. Evan says of this relationship, “My body is a thing— it does not function how I want. My thingness leads to bonds with and fights against objects as I depend on them to transform my body into a successful object. Having my disability means that there is no such thing as a mundane object.”
Ari Golub
Tic Triptych
District of Columbia
digital pigment prints
POR
Ari Golub’s triptych discloses Tourette Syndrome unapologetically. Everyone with Tourette Syndrome decides how to cope and disclose individually. However, his tics are inherently loud and profane, as he has a rare symptom of Tourette that only 10-15% of people with TS experience. Because of this, he has to explain himself everywhere he goes. Popular media stereotypes TS on a consistent basis, leaving his tics difficult for society to coexist with, yet more difficult for him to navigate the world with. As he says to people who constantly harass him over his condition: “I’m sorry it bothers you; it bothers me more.”
“If you take one thing away from this work, do not let it be pity. Research Tourette and its comorbid conditions. Research other disabilities. Read. Listen. Ask questions and be curious. Do not be a bystander. Be an ally. Have my back.”
Aurora Berger
Restoration
Vermont
photographs printed on fabric, digital pigment prints
POR
In the summer of 2018 Aurora Berger created this durational work of art in the forest surrounding her childhood home in South Strafford, Vermont. At the beginning of summer she placed seventeen black and white photographic fabric prints of her body in the forest, and watched over the next few months as they slowly disintegrated. “Being disabled usually negatively affects the way that I negotiate space,” says Berger, “but in this place where I first learned how to walk and how to see, it's much easier to be my body.” As the summer ended she retrieved her photographs from the trees and streams where they had become embedded. She watched them as they changed from pristine blacks and whites to faded browns and greys. With edges frayed and coated in pine sap, she said the work finally felt whole.
To Berger these works are about the restoration of body and place. “My body can never be restored, only conserved. These photographs represent more than their physical forms. They are wind-battered and torn, and they are still me.”
In her artist statement she quotes Eli Clare, “[Cure] grounds itself in an original state of being, relying on the belief that what existed before is superior to what exists currently…but for some of us, even if we accept disability as damage to individual body-minds, these tenets quickly become tangled, because an original non-disabled state of being doesn’t exist.”
Julia McGehean
Personal Belongings
Pennsylvania
mixed media
POR
As an artist who has been passed down a twice exceptional brain, Julia McGehean continuously explores the dynamics of being both gifted and dyslexic in her work. As her eyes scan a string of letters on a white page, they are constantly jolted up, down, backwards, and forwards; all while skipping over or introducing words that do not belong in that line. These jumbled sentences, caused by her tracking disorder, often have a humorous quality that embodies a similar absurdity to a discordant cluster of bric-à-brac.
She has translated this rocky relationship with reading into a picture based language that highlights her strengths in creative problem solving. Abstracted scenes of family gatherings are formed in a circular motion that compositionally embody the internal distress of reading dense text in a time sensitive setting. Through this visual cacophony, personal narratives of both leisure and pain are sandwiched together by juxtaposing color, size, scale, and function in ways that shifts dramatically in dimensionality.
Elizabeth Scheeler
Welcome to my class!
Arkansas
screen prints on doormats
POR
Elizabeth Sheeler’s Welcome to my class! explores stereotype and language within the disability community. In this body of work she screen printed phrases that her college professors have said to her throughout her academic career on doormats.
In her artist statement she says, “Through my object making, performance, and interactive media I put the viewer in a position where they have to make conflucing choices. This puts the participant in a situation that forces them to look inward, examining themselves, their experience, and to find their own way to an introspective empathy...An initial building block of inequality forms within the power dynamic that society exercises on a regular basis.” It is this power dynamic that Sheeler critiques and asks the audience of her work to question in their own lives.
Libby Evan
Scrunchies
New York
fabric, elastic
POR
Libby Evan translates overlooked objects and accessories into new scales and media in order to spark new meaning, create new perspectives, and create inclusive ways for others to understand her relationship to these objects. She has severe arthritis and chronic fatigue syndrome so when she puts up her hair, a small scrunchie’s scale is magnified as it becomes an obstacle with which she wrestles. Using the large scale Scrunchies to put up one’s hair is a ridiculous, humorous, cumbersome, and impossible task, thus mirroring her experience with regular scrunchies.
Viewers are invited to interact with the scrunchies. If you need assistance taking down or putting up these pieces, please see a Gallery Associate.
Elizabeth Scheeler
8in. x 5in. x 6in. Amazon Prime 9/22
Arkansas
frosted plexiglass box, light, pedestal, mystery item
POR
In Elizabeth Sheeler’s piece, 8in. x 5in. x 6in. Amazon Prime 9/22, she placed an unknown item, which she randomly ordered off of Amazon, into a frosted plexiglass box. The only visible parts of the object are the vage shapes and shadows that are cast in the box. To this day, no one knows what is inside the box. Sheeler’s practice is heavily influenced by an eye condition she has had since birth, Aniridia; a condition that impedes proper eye growth during early development. Sheeler was born without functioning irises which causes sensitivity to light, blurriness, lack of depth perception, and difficulty reading most traditionally sized texts. Instead of letting it be a barrier, she uses her Aniridia to her advantage and has centered the conceptual foundation of her art practice around it. Through her work she challenges the viewer to experience her work in a different way, often employing the other senses in that exploration.