Outside the Lines

Self Portraits by Artists with Disabilities

Curatorial Statement

Outside the Lines? Yeah, I learned about that in school. The teacher gives you a xeroxed turkey to colour for Thanksgiving, and if you go outside the lines, it’s bad. Disability culture? I never learned that one in school – or maybe I did. Absence is a teacher. Scraps of images, stored away, tell me who The Disabled are.

Rows of long tables in the institution, with rows of people weaving plastic Christmas wreaths. A greeting card, looks kinda like a pale nervous Monet — on the back it says some guy painted it with his foot.

Something to do with tragedy, with charity, with dancing dogs. We The Normal are moved by their plight, by their valiant attempt at art.

‘Cept I never was normal.
Disability culture is the view from our side, the rage woven into each wreath, the way your foot cramps up but you just want those colours.

Frieda Kahlo painting a hammer and sickle on her body cast. Henri Matisse strapping brushes to his knotted hands. Each artist in Outside the Lines started with a set of limits: a 15 inch square. What they did with the limitations was up to them. Some people chose to work inside the square. Some ignored it. Some tore it to bits and built something new out of the pieces.

People with disabilities are generally familiar with the concept of limits: can’t cross the street there’s a curb, can’t understand the speaker there’s no sign interpreter, can’t read the instructions, can’t feel my feet, can’t get out of bed. Everyone has limitations – even the most able-bodied people can’t swivel their heads 180 degrees and check out the view behind them. But then again our world isn’t set up so you have to watch your back like that in order to get anywhere.

As an artist, I love limitations. It’s like – “You can write anything you want, except it has to use a fixed form consisting of fourteen lines of five-foot iambic pentameter, with the lines grouped in three quatrains with six alternating rhymes, followed by a detached rhymed couplet which is epigrammatic.” Wow. A sonnet.

As a person with a disability, I love the wildly creative ways we find to deal with the limitations that society and/or our own bodies throw at us. We crash over curbs, or find a driveway down the block, or sit at the cross walk cursing, or organize for curb cuts, or. We get tricky, learn to lie, hide, slide out from under pitying stereotypes. We steal fire, share secrets, laugh ourselves sick, make art.

Claire Kujundzic picking up her paint brush. Paul Lang rolling the dice for survival. Emma Kivisild sending a message. Jordan Lige changing shape.

All twenty-one artists have broken the square we stuck them in: quietly, outrageously, with anger, with joy. Presence is also a teacher.

Persimmon Blackbridge, curator

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