Exhibition Dates: March 9 - May 19, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, March 15 7-9pm
An embroidery needle slips through the warp and weft of soft linen fabric. The flash of cool steel is followed by a lazy trail of lilac thread interconnecting the fibres, holding them close. Text emerges slowly, an act of revelation sustained over days, months, and even years. Our stories reveal themselves on their own time. Inspired by the frameworks of disability justice and queer crip theory, this exhibition is a celebration of slowness as an embodied act of queer resistance. Showcasing a collection of works by artists Richard Boulet and Chelsey Campbell, each piece reveals the transformative capacity of crip storytelling, liberatory access, and care built and nurtured over time. Weaving together textiles, installation, and print media with narratives of resistance, kinship, and healing, if slow is where we’re heading invites the audience to rest, to sit with our stories and listen to the wisdom of their bodyminds. To bend the clock, break it.
Richard Boulet (he/him) is a queer crip artist who focuses on the empowerment of the individual and, therefore, community through the importance of mental health. Richard works in amiskwacîwâskahikan on Treaty 6 territory (or Edmonton, Alberta). Starting with creating children’s books for a friend, he took a winding path to reach primarily textile work. His current focus is cross-stitching and beading exploring mental health and emerging expressions of being queer, as well as simple ideas on kinship. This artist identifies as the tortoise rather than the hare.
Chelsey Campbell (they/she) is a queer crip artist, educator, and cultural worker in amiskwacîwâskahikan on Treaty 6 territory (or Edmonton, Alberta). Exploring narratives of disability justice, feminized care labour, and crip kinship, their practice intertwines performance autoethnography with community-oriented practices of access, care, and interdependence. The exhibition itself was developed slowly, making space for ideas and crip kinship to flourish, revealing itself over time and many conversations between the artists and curators. The artists have collected a series of writings that explore some of the embodied experiences of slow as queer resistance that inform the work.