Invisible Disabilities Exhibit

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INVISIBLE DISABILITIES Curated by Samantha M. Joyce and designed by John Quatrle

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS Sam Fein, Kyleah Kirby, Alex Miklowski, Linda Morgenstern, James Perry, Jr., Stacy Shorr, Jenn Stanley, Susan K Teal, Jennifer Turpin, Yolanda He Yang View all the art: UnboundVisualArts.org/product-category/invisible-disabilities-at-uvas-arthaus-gallery

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Curatorial Statement: When we look at art, we want to see ourselves represented in it and in the space where the art is showcased. But what happens when you have a disability that is not easily seen by the naked eye?

Disabilities such as ASD (autism spectrum disorder), ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), chronic illnesses, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/ Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) and mental illnesses are not always recognizable to individuals who are not familiar with them. Because invisible disabilities often go unrecognized, people with invisible disabilities are underrepresented in many gallery exhibitions.

With this exhibition, I want to create a safe and welcoming place for individuals who have invisible disabilities to share their experiences and their artwork. This exhibition aims to represent a variety of experiences and explores questions about representation: In what ways do works of visual art shed light on the experiences of those with invisible disabilities? To whom are different invisible disabilities visible and to whom are they invisible? Can increasing representation of individuals with invisible disabilities in art and other media lead to broader social changes?

It is my hope that this exhibit helps educate the public about invisible disabilities and provides a framework for how invisible disabilities can be better represented in the visual arts. I want other galleries and museums to see what we have created and follow suit, so we can continue to build a wider audience for artists with invisible disabilities.

Samantha M. Joyce, Exhibit Curator Samantha M Joyce graduated from the University of Westminster in London UK in 2020. She received her Master’s degree in Museums, Galleries, and Contemporary Culture. During her course work she interned at the Museum of Brands and Fulham Palace. As a Massachusetts native she has returned home and works as a Visitor’s Assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Art. With this gracious opportunity she hopes to continue curating exhibitions that bring light to disabilities and how they are reflected in the art world.

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Sam Fein Sam Fein deconstructs interpersonal relations and emotional conditions within social frameworks of power. She explores how social hierarchies form, how authority is determined and maintained, and how implicit messages of power are communicated.

The artworks draw upon personal history, mining her upbringing to fuse memory with imagination.

The densely-layered narratives present a form of visual storytelling that is both comedic and bizarre. Bold colors, quirky characters, whimsical scenes, and symbolic details contrast a darker psychological underpinning, creating a disjointed and unsettling reality.

Embracing paradox, her art highlights the subjectivity of meaning-making within human experience and questions the notion of a single objective truth. Rather than replicating the literalism of the physical world, each piece gives voice to a uniquely individualized reality.

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Kyleah Kirby Kyleah Kirby is a mixed media artist whose focus is textured vessels from and for the disabled body. They employ pointillism, dissonant color, and kid-craft to invite the viewer/feeler into an experience of sensory meditation and/or overwhelm.

These two vessels were both crafted during intense episodes of 2021.

"Mother" during a cancer recurrence scare and deep depression.

"Peachie Green" while anticipating a stressful family holiday out of state, and all the pain that traveling brings. Bright and confectionary, one must move past the initial whimsy to see the million moments of agony that comprise them.

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Alex Miklowski Art is a method of healing and maintaining good health for me. Expressing rage and discontent with systems and institutions that harm us and our neighbors is just as important as expressing the gratitude we have for the people and resources we do have in our lives. As a person living with invisible disabilities, I believe in offering others the benefit of the doubt in most situations.

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Linda Morgenstern These paintings were originally based on the legendary Provincetown Artist Shack. The classic A frame. A form I have carried in my consciousness for as long as I can remember.

Over two and a half years of painting The House Series, I see they have become an inner landscape of illness and isolation.

A poison dart hit me three decades ago, in the form of a virus.

And I never recovered. For the past ten years, I have been mostly house and bed bound.

My studio is steps away from my bedroom. I paint in a barely conscious state and allow myself to simply respond to what appears on the page. I rely on serendipity.

The structure of the A frame was a place to begin.

How I yearn to be outdoors in that changing light. In that imagined place.

Conventions of right angles, structurally sound geometry, the expected pitch of a roof, and even the weight of the building on the ground —-are all abandoned.

Sky becomes dune.

Water becomes sand.

Light no longer matches shadow, and time of day is indeterminate.

In Freudian Dream analysis, Dreams of houses are representations of the body.

These houses no longer have coherence.

They are no longer reliable.

Home is Sanctuary.

Where we rest, sleep fitfully, remain unshowered; letting illness have its way.

It is also our Prison, where we spend years, sometimes decades, isolated from society.

Missing rituals. Daily exchanges.

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9 We who suffer with ME/CFS have a chronic invisible illness, and we, ourselves, have become invisible. Living in our absence.

Behind the walls are people whose lives have been stripped of work, income, social value, self determination, recreation, family and life companions — who resent or resist becoming caregivers.

Invisible illness has no arc.

No narrative.

It is.

And it is not.

I want to go home, again, to the person I recognize as me.

To the exquisite delight of hours lost in a book.

To the possibility of planning.

To the security of care.

To the safety of myself.

To laughter at the absurd and pleasure in the unpredictable.

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James Perry, Jr. I am an image-maker. I use my talent to interpret the world in how I see it. When others see desperation I see hope. When others see a wasteland I see beauty.

Through my drawings and paintings, I try to give the viewer a glimpse into my mind. I’m constantly trying to pull beauty out of blank sheets of paper and drawings.

My mission is to make a better world with the images I create.

Stacy Shorr Let the art speak for itself, is my 1st thought. I started painting in oils and as a surrealist in my youth. Since then I have had the good fortune to be able to experiment with all kinds of media and styles, eventually developing my own, which has no name..

One of my favorite types of work is portraiture. In portraits, the most important element to me is conveying the emotion or mood of the moment, in addition to the likeness. And I think this extends to other types of painting and subjects as well. I'm not

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linger by nature. I eventually embraced this rather than fight it and my life has been richer for it. I often am working on more than one painting at a time, often sitting side by side, and working back and forth. Art is its own language so my description falls short. I think Edward Hooper said it best, "If I could tell you in words, there would be no reason for me to paint."

Jenn Stanley I was born a product of the culture wars and am continuously caught in its crossfires. Themes like religion, science, destruction and creation punctuate my work. My practice interrogates social oppression and hierarchy, and I’m particularly interested in confronting the laws and practices that strip people of body sovereignty.

My memory is long but identity eludes me. "hail mary, marie, martyr" sorts through the fragments, communicating through time and space to my infinite selves. It’s an abstract meditation on autonomy comprising three audio pieces – ab aeterno (00:00-11:41), all the fathers 11:42-16:02, and we are also divine (16:03-23:03) – stitched together in a ritual performance. "bob hope no hope" explores the relationship between war and corporate media. I approach it from the perspective of an otherworldly consciousness, picking up signals from Earth during the brief period in which humans have used radio waves for communication. “bob hope no hope” examines how seemingly ephemeral entertainment can collect, rot and subsequently poison

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otherwise creative, fertile ground. This sonic journey asks the listener to consider what sirens call us to engineer our own demise.

Bob hope no hope Audio

Susan K Teal My body of work explores the concept of self-identity. I am the subject of my own work, visually interpreting my struggles with anxiety and trauma. Using reference photos that I take of myself in the midst of anxiety attacks, I paint realistic self-portraits with multiple faces peeling away from one another, each expressing different emotions. The distortion created within my work is an effort to translate my complex feelings of sadness, anger, and fear onto the painted surface. In this way I explore who I am. The final effect borders on disturbing as it reveals a reflection of my reality.

This series was born in January 2020, inspired by the worst experience of my life; the disappearance and death of my aunt. In the months following, more events continued to add to my stress and anxiety and as I went into isolation with the rest of the world, I found myself unable to escape the thoughts and emotions that can overwhelm me. Trying to imagine what the future holds makes my chest tight and my fears rise. Moving forward, I will focus on the short term. In the future, I can only have hope.

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Jennifer Turpin Capturing the simplicity, color and texture is everything for me.

As an Illustrator/Designer these three components have always been what I look for when I create new artwork. It’s my inspiration. This artwork represents my own version of how I have been emerging from confinement during this pandemic.

This artwork represents how things has not been normal since the pandemic started, the black canvas represents the dark time and difficult time I had during the pandemic and how I 14

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had to emergence from it and find creative ways to get through the long days of staying home during lockdown and social distancing inside my own house, so no one catches Covid-19. The black also represents the changes that I didn’t like during the pandemic such as doing online classes and not being able to spend time with my classmates in person. The artwork represents how I was able to find ways to have hope again, in this case learning to appreciate little things in nature, people around me and everything I am grateful to still have. The jar with a little bug on the top represents me finding new joys and wonder and looking at the stars and nature in a new perspective.

Yolanda He Yang Yolanda He Yang is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the forms of language, relationship, emotion, geometry, religion, and social justice. Her artwork includes set design, sculpture, painting, videos, songwriting, poetry.

She explores the psychodynamics of form as a language of the unconscious, taking up the psychic mechanisms of visual thinking as she puts her hands on every material.

For her, art-making is a process that leads her to be aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings that incubate the substratum of her being. She believes our lives are mostly a constant evasion of the visible and sensible world. Yolanda seeks to transform content from her unconscious conflicts to make a body of sculpture in which others may find meaning and value.

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Caused by past traumatic experiences, the two works that Yolanda submitted for this show visualize her chaotic and fragmented inner worlds when she experiences the issue of hallucinations and Insecurity Behind Narcissistic Personality (NPD). Shattered mirrors became her primary medium during the pandemic. The name of the two works manifests her overlapped structure about time which has weaved a suffocating cage with memories that hardly can jump out. Through recreating the scenarios through art, she recognizes she has self-conducted Exposure Therapy since she was a small child. The power of confronting the past leads her to explore her deep nature and maneuver that "negative" talents in the thriving self-salvation path.

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Disabilities Explained Autism Spectrum Disorder ——Explanation No.1: From: National Institute of Mental Health

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurological and developmental disorder that affects how people interact with others, communicate, learn, and behave.

People with ASD often have:

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Difficulty with communication and interaction with other people

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Restricted interests and repetitive behaviors

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Symptoms that affect their ability to function in school, work, and other areas of life

——Explanation No.2: From: Better Health Channel (the Department of Health, State Government of Victoria, Australia)

Autism spectrum disorder is a condition that affects a person’s ability to interact with the world around them. People with ASD find communication and socializing difficult. Also, they like routine and predictability.

The characteristics of people with ASD can vary significantly. Some autistic people never develop language, while others might have good verbal language skills.

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Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder From: Better Health Channel

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a condition that affects a young child’s behavior and learning. A child with ADHD has three main symptoms, inattention, impulsivity, and overactivity.

It’s not a sign of low intelligence. With understanding, care and medical treatment people with ADHD can be successfully supported to overcome these difficulties.

Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome From: Better Health Channel, CDC

Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a serious, long-term illness that affects many body systems. The causes of ME/CFS are complex and not yet fully understood. There is no cure yet.

ME/CFS often makes it hard to keep a job, go to school, and take part in family and social life. People with ME/CFS have overwhelming fatigue that is not improved by rest. At least one in four ME/CFS patients is bed- or house-bound for long periods during their illness.

Anxiety Disorder From: Better Health Channel 18

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Anxiety becomes a disorder when it’s irrational, excessive and when it interferes with a person’s ability to function in daily life. Anxiety disorders include:

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Generalized anxiety disorder

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Social phobias: fear of social situations

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Specific phobias: for example a fear of open spaces (agoraphobia) or enclosed spaces (claustrophobia)

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Panic disorders: frequent and debilitating panic attacks.

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Unbound Visual Arts (UVA) is a unique Allston-Brighton based non-profit art organization. We serve the Greater Boston community with impactful educational programs and exhibits to encourage learning, engagement, and change.

Unbound Visual Arts, Inc. 320 Washington St., Suite 200, Brighton, MA 02135 43 N. Beacon St., Allston, MA 02134 www.UnboundVisualArts.org info@UnboundVisualArts.org 617-657-4278 Exhibit Assistance: Henry Bamford, Maisie French, Nicholas Komarnitsky, Hanzhi Li, Maggie Satterthwaite

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Board of Directors and Council of Advisors Louise Bonar Tsun-Ming Chmielinski Francis Gardino Bob Greene Marcie Laden Madeline Lee Jeanne Lin Susan Loomis-Wing Brenda Gael McSweeney, PhD Andrea Newman Ira-Ilana Papadopoulou, PhD John Quatrale Ruth Rieffanaugh Diane Sheriden Karen Smigliani Jennifer Turpin Christine Winship

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