Behind Vanessa is Julia Aleida González’s “My Big Chin” PHOTO by Cenìnye Harris
How does design impact your life? How often do you think about it? We at Fun4theDisabled are incredibly excited to tell you about an exhibit we visited recently that confronts those exact questions and raises many more. The exhibit, Voices Embodied: Reverberations, centers around “the collective sentiment around disability,” particularly where it comes into contact with identity and accessibility.
Jonas Müller-Ahlheim “chalk underneath objects”
This exhibit is the fifth in curator Alex Stark’s ongoing Voices Embodied series, which seeks to explore disability through various mediums. It conceptualizes individual experiences with disability “in relation to broader conversations about identity, access, and the
David Bobier, “Private Eye”
body.” Reverberations is being showcased at the Design Museum of Chicago and, therefore, utilizes design to explore barriers, either societal or individualized, and how they intersect with the 18 showcased artists’ lives. The exhibit was curated by Alex Stark, who is currently an advisor and event planner in SAIC’s Disability and Learning Resource Center. You can watch him talk more about the project and process behind it here on WGN.
The works make a point to appeal to a multitude of senses, take David Bobier’s “Private Eye,” pictured below, which plays audio of underwater recordings throughout the entire piece, causing movement and dynamic imaging. Bobier, a hard-of-hearing and disabled artist, plays the elements off of each other to achieve a “transitioning and re-interpreting of content and experience from one medium to another.”
Yimei (Emair) Zhu, “Sight Cite” PHOTO by Cenìnye Harris
All of the works contain many layers and overlapping contexts, like Yimei (Emair) Zhu’s piece Sight Cite, which uses a fungal silhouette to visualize “navigation and adaptation” in the context of those with disabilities and a more general sense.
While the work is literally and physically accessible, it is also a highly artistically accessible exhibit as well. Some art makes a point of being prickly, as part of its nature or execution it is uninviting or closed off. This is not a bad thing (there is never a “wrong” way to make art!), but I bring it up to say that this exhibit is the opposite. It is open and raw and invites the viewer to interact with it, experience it, and put themselves in the hands of the artists who made the work. It is a vibrant and visceral experience, and we cannot encourage you enough to check it out for yourselves.
The exhibition will be open until October 13, 2024. It is located at the Design Museum of Chicago, 72 E. Randolph, and is free to the public. Full transcripts and audio descriptions are available on their website here.
Aaron McPeake, “Subjective Acuity”
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