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>> The Paul K. Longmore Institute
on Disability Launch Event.
10-11-2012, San Francisco State University.
Amanda Cachia, PhD student, UC-San Diego.
>> Amanda Cachia: I'd like to extend my thanks, first of all
to Emily Beitiks and especially Catherine Kudlick
for inviting me here.
It's such an honor, and I'd like to congratulate you both
on your roles and to the university for this occasion.
It's such a historical moment
and it's an honor to be here with it.
So, as Cathy mentioned, I'm a freelance curator,
and I've just begun my ambitious plan to complete my dual PhD
in communications and in art history, theory and criticism
at the University of California, in San Diego.
So in doing my PhD, I'll be focusing very broadly
on the relationship between representation
and social identity in contemporary art practice,
particularly how this relates to disability and issues
of normativity and embodiment.
Now I came to work in this area as I've always wanted
to meld together the issues and challenges stemming
from my personal and social life,
as a woman with a rare form of dwarfism named "brachyolmia",
with my creative and professional life, as a curator.
But most importantly, I was affected
by several critical events in my childhood,
one of which included a white, male doctor's gaze on my body
when I was 10 or 11 years old, a gaze that emanated
from medical privilege and authority that was to determine
if my body was "normal" or "abnormal."
And so that consequently led to my interest
in changing perceptions and opening up conversations
about what one can do, moving in on through occupations
of language and definitions around the word "disability."
So back in that doctor's office, all those years ago,
I was made to feel that my body was wrong,
and that I was limited.
And so now I'm able to identify as disabled,
and it took me a long time to get to that point,
because I never thought I was disabled.
Sometimes it's difficult to reach items on a top shelf
in a grocery store or to see a bank teller over a high counter,
but I saw these challenges as something to overcome.
But I've come to see that I am disabled, because I believe
that I share common characteristics
with others who are disabled.
Whether they are deaf, blind, paralyzed from the waist down,
or need a wheelchair for mobility.
So for me, the label "disabled" means identifying
with feeling socially and culturally marginalized
because my body is atypical from others.
So in the past two years,
I've been developing my research based on the work
of Laura Swanson and Corban Walker,
during my master's thesis at the California College of the Arts,
here in San Francisco.
But these artists challenge dominant culture's perceptions
of scale, size and proportion
as they inscribe their site specific sculptures
with their experience of dwarfism.
So in doing so, I believe that they adjust
and destabilize an often reductive representation
of the disabled body as they move towards more complex
embodied forms.
The artists also move away from problematic figures
such as the midget or the freak, as portrayed in historical
and contemporary western visual discourses, particularly
in popular culture, the entertainment industry
and canonical art history.
In the past year, I've been working very hard towards
turning my Master's thesis research into an exhibition,
so I'm pleased to say that on Friday, October 26,
my exhibition, "What Can a Body Do?"
will open at Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College
in Pennsylvania, that features the work
of nine contemporary artists who invent and reframe disability
across a range of media.
The work presented in this exhibition ranges
from figurative and abstract objects to performance pieces
and recordings of experiential art,
that engage with individual experiences of embodiment,
but also asks how bodies perform beauty,
how they make our bodies feel,
how they interact with other bodies.
In other words, what bodies can do.
It conceives of people with disabilities not as objects
of study or a stigmatizing gaze,
but as subjects whose unique perspective engender valuable,
particularized knowledge.
Several works foreground perception and accessibility
through their engagement with multi-sensory experience
and sensory translation, so to many,
providing access simply means modifying a suitable space,
but to those who are more informed,
access also means making information available
and in alternate modes, hiring ASL interpreters,
using technology creatively, providing text in large print
and alternative format and so on.
But once we begin to imagine what full access might look
like, the possibilities are actually endless.
The concept is elusive and protean.
Access involves more than just checking off a list
of practical accommodations.
It's really a way of thinking about the world,
that challenges us to imagine how another body,
another self-experiences it.
So it's my goal to continue to push the area
into my curatorial practice.
So in my dissertation, I'm going
to concentrate on two major areas.
I hope to conduct a reading of work
by contemporary disabled artists and also a re-reading
of contemporary art by established disabled
and non-disabled artists,
through a disability studies lens
and how these two areas may fruitfully intersect.
I believe that it's essential to have both of these components
because I'm attempting
to strategically invigorate art history
and contemporary art discourse both with an insider
and outsider perspective.
In other words, I'd like to speak as one operating
within the cannon and yet simultaneously inject the cannon
with a new framework of "other," working across the center
and in the margin and try and break down these binaries.
So in my reading of work by contemporary, disabled artists,
I'll be thinking and writing about how a viewer's perceptions
of the disabled body can be shifted
by encountering a plethora of atypical,
physical experiences inscribed in a work of art.
So I believe that I am poised to invigorate visual culture
in new ways as I bring to the forefront an awareness
that disability in a bid to foster new critical
and socially just representation.
Thank you so much.
[ Applause ]