DEADLINE TO SUBMIT:
JULY 17, 2023 MIDNIGHT
Thank you for your interest in submitting your artwork to the 31st Rendezvous with Madness Festival Visual Art Exhibition. The exhibition will be taking place over the month of October 2023. This year, Workman Arts is excited to be working with guest curator Sarah-Tai Black to facillitate the mounting of a themed exhibition.
For this year's exhibtion, we are soliciting artworks that center crip /disabled experience. Working forward from the knowledge offered in Mia Mingus’ text, Access Intimacy, we are looking for artists that make work about how crip/disabled people show up for each other and imagine liberated futures for one another, despite often having fluctuating access to the energy, spaces, and resources to do so.
This exhibition seeks to ask the following questions and more:
- Why and how is access intimate?
- How can access intimacy tend to the isolation of disability? How does it pattern or reconfigure space, time, and relation?
- How does the experience of neurodivergence alongside disability shape access intimacy?
- How can we learn from each other, for each other? How do we share knowledge? How do we witness and care for one another in this exchange?
- How does what crip folks make possible for one other offer a model for larger structures of care?
- How can we make access intimacy a prerequisite for the creation of collective public spaces?
- What might a liberated and collective crip future look like? What is the relation between crip futures and imaginings of utopia?
- How might art-making function as, express, or witness crip-centered care work? Freedom work?
We are interested in works that:
- center an embodied crip experience
- engage with sensory feelings and memory work
- center accessible methods of knowledge sharing and communication
- refuse the regime of legibility to able-bodied and/or neurotypical audiences
- witness one another as they witness themselves
- Works that live in multiple intersections of identities.
- Work that asks us to consider the intimacy of access/access intimacy from a variety of positions
- act as witness to lived feelings and the specificities of intersecting experiences
You may submit two recent bodies of work (a body of work is a series of artworks that are thematically linked together), installations, multimedia works, or project for consideration. We will review works in progress (please give us as much information as possible on what is yet to come and any relevant support material). Please visit our FAQ for more info.
Eligibilty:
This call for submissions is open to all artists working within the themes and expereriences outlined above. There are no restrictions on citizenship status, career level, or regional location. Artists do not need to be affiliated with Workman Arts or CAMH to apply. There is no fee to submit to our festival.
Compensation:
Artists will recieve an artist fee and a materials fee, both in line with CARFAC's recommendations for group exhibitions.
Selection Process:
Submissions will be reviewed by our guest curator Sarah-Tai Black, as well as Workman Arts and RWM staff. Results will be announced by the end of July 2023.
Questions / Support:
Please visit our website for more info and our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) here. If you have any questions please email Visual Arts Manager Joshua Vettivelu at josh_vettivelu@workmanarts.com or telephone 416-583-4339, ext. 6
If you require accessibility supports to complete this application please email Raine Laurent-Eugéne raine_laurenteugene@workmanarts.com or telephone at 416-583-4339, ext. 9