Join Artist Carmen Papalia and Independent Curator Amanda Cachia to celebrate the launch of BlackFlash Issue 38.2, A Temporary, Collectively-Held Space. Carmen Papalia and Amanda Cachia will explore themes in the editorial essay for the issue, of which Carmen is guest editor as well as the multifaceted exhibition Provisional Structures: Carmen Papalia with Vo Vo and jes sachse at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. This issue includes a thoughtful collection of writing and reflections by Aislinn Thomas, Vo Vo, Kay Slater, Vanessa Dion-Fletcher, Joselia Hughes, Lisa Prentice, Cecily Nicholson, and Mercedes Eng.
This event will be streamed online through the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s Facebook, YouTube, and website, and will be presented with closed captioning and ASL interpretation.
Carmen Papalia is a nonvisual social practice artist with severe chronic and episodic pain. In 2021 he co-founded the Open Access Foundation for Arts & Culture (OAFAC), a pandemic-era cultural organization that aims to set a new cultural standard for accessibility by nurturing creative and justice-oriented accessibility practices. Addressing the limited representation of those with lived experience of disability in leadership roles within the visual and performing arts, OAFAC’s activities advance disability culture and artistry within a contemporary art context through disability-lead trainings, curation, public engagements, exhibitions, performances, educational campaigns and site-specific project development with artists, curators and cultural workers.
Since 2009 Papalia has used organizing strategies and improvisation to address his access to public space, the art institution and visual culture. As a convener, he establishes welcoming spaces where disabled, sick and chronically ill people build capacity for care that they lack on account of governmental failure and medical ableism. His work, which takes forms ranging from collaborative performance to public intervention, is a response to the harms of the Medical Model of Disability, a framework that erases disability experience by reinforcing ableist concepts of normalcy. In 2020 Papalia was one of 25 artists who received the Sobey Art Award; in 2019 he was a Sobey long list recipient in the West Coast / Yukon region. Papalia also received the 2014 Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary, which supported a 3-month residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the 2013 Wynn Newhouse Award. His work has been featured at: The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, the Tate Liverpool, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Gallery Gachet, among others.
Amanda Cachia is an independent curator and critic from Sydney, Australia. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego in 2017. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art; curatorial studies and activism; exhibition design and access; decolonizing the museum; and the politics of embodied disability language in visual culture. She is currently working on two book projects: a monograph based on her dissertation entitled Disability, Art, Agency: Participation and the Revision of the Senses solicited by Duke University Press, and the edited volume Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation under contract with Routledge to be released in December 2022, that includes over 30 contributors from around the world. Cachia currently teaches art history, visual culture, and curatorial studies at Otis College of Art and Design, California Institute of the Arts, California State University Long Beach, and California State University San Marcos. She serves as caa.reviews Field Editor for West Coast Exhibitions (2020-2023).
Feature image: Cecily Nicholson, Leaves, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.
Image description: The top two thirds of this photograph are filled with an ultra-close-up of a red lettuce leaf, taken from beneath, positioned as if it’s an awning protecting the camera from the sun. The leaf is wide, ruffled, and dew-dropped, and sunlight penetrates the green segments, but not the red. Beneath the red lettuce awning, a view of many rows of varieties of lettuce, round and full, at their prime for harvest, growing from dark soil
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