Staring Back and Forth: The Photographs of Kevin Connolly

Kevin Connolly, who was born without legs, photographs people staring at him around the world. The photographs represent staring as a multi-cultural and multi-generation act. In this paper, I discuss the phenomena of staring in art and everyday life, from perspectives of art history and disability studies, in relationship to Connolly's photographs. I argue that Connelly's photographs reveal an embodied perspective and subject position of disability through staring back

Family Legacies: The Art of Betye, Lezley and Alison Saar at the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC.

Family Legacies: The Art of Betye, Lezley and Alison Saar is the first major exhibition to feature together the artwork of this mother and two daughters. The fifty mixed-media pieces span over forty years of work (1964–2005) and embody multiple legacies: personal, familial, cultural, and artistic. Overall, the exhibition presents visually provocative and historically significant work, and succeeds in drawing informative connections between the pieces without minimizing each artist’s individuality. The show is co-curated by Jessica Dallow, art history professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Ackland’s Barbara Matilsky, in collaboration with the artists. Instructional materials explore the multiple connotations of each piece and include artists’ quotes. Wall labels offer comparative images drawn from art history and popular culture, and articulate major organizational themes of the show: “art, family, and identity”; “interpreting stereotypes and offering alternative histories”; “reconsidering slavery”; “interpreting mixed-race ancestry”; and “revealing the spirit through art.” These themes overlap and materialize differently in each work, articulated best in the artists’ production of and relationship with domestic, ritual, personal, industrial, and organic objects. History, memory, and spirituality Family Legacies: The Art of Betye, Lezley and Alison Saar http://caareviews.org/reviews/840 animate the materials of these mixed-media assemblages, forms that are conducive to their multi-referential themes

Exceeding the Frame: The Photography of Diane Arbus

Metaphors for vision overwhelm the English language. "To see" is to know or to understand; "to envision" is to create or innovate; "to gaze" is to project desire, possess, and control; "to watch" is to study, examine, or take heed; "to witness" is to take part in history. Looking invokes embodied interest; glancing is unconscious; staring is deliberate and sometimes unsanctioned. Viewing proves dubious at best, especially when it comes to looking at other people, ourselves, and being looked at. Photography intensifies these metaphors for vision, turning human acts and appearances into images. Through various genres and conventions, photography frames human bodies for viewing and assigns meaning to them. Photographer Diane Arbus exploits the dynamics of viewing through her medium and form, transgressing the frames between representation and everyday life. Her work is often criticized because it defies photographic conventions and social norms for seeing and being seen, as it frames the viewer in the leery acts of looking. Best known for her distinctive style of portraiture, Arbus's oeuvre is about people watching and the people who capture the eye, who attract the gaze and stare, and who become questionable metaphors by being seen, watched, photographed, and publicly displayed

Performing Amputation: The Photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin

The contemporary photography of Joel-Peter Witkin takes center stage in Performing Amputation. Many of his photographs feature amputee models in excessive and theatrical displays. The compositions recall, parody, and strategically corrupt traditions of bodily representation found in classical and neoclassical sculpture, ornamental motifs, the art historical still life, medical exhibits and photographs, and the early modern freak show. With the amputee body and amputating techniques, Witkin dismembers and sutures together multiple visual traditions. Witkin takes on the history of art and photography and effectively performs amputation on their visual conventions as he performs literal surgery on his images. His personal touch on the photographic plate and print perverts the assumed neutrality of the photographic gaze. The camera has been used as an instrument of medicine and of the gaze historically, a history in which Witkin‘s images intervene. I argue that Witkin‘s controversial and excessive photographs disrupt medical models for disability by presenting disabled and disfigured bodies as objects of art, design, and aesthetic magnificence, particularly because of their curious and spectacular, abnormal bodies. His camera both references and enacts images of objectification by displaying the body as an object. However, Witkin‘s amputee and other disfigured subjects elect and even request to be photographed; they therefore collaborate with Witkin in their production as photographic spectacles. As stages on which these models perform, the photographs may serve as venues for progressive self-exhibition and unashamed parading of the so-called abnormal body

Jim Hodges at Weatherspoon Art Museum

Jim Hodges's enchanting, multi-faceted work appeared on the 1990s art scene like a ray of sunshine, his artistic illusions with light and mirrors inverting the often alienating postmodern disillusionment of much contemporary art. Favoring the sensual over the sensible and the infinitely perceptual over the tediously cerebral, his works are all activated by light and thematically allude to landscapes. The work is not simply decadent, as disclosure of deeper layers provides enlightenment through visual pleasure. Hodges's lighthearted twists on art history are charming and inviting to diverse viewers, whose engagement completes the work

"Other? Fish in the Sea: Finding Nemo as an Epic Representation of Disability

The animated feature "Finding Nemo" swept the box office last summer, and audiences of all ages and critics alike were overwhelmed by how a seemingly simple story had made such a splash. Recently having a second life on DVD, the film has become the most financially successful film of 2003 and the largest grossing animated feature of all time, outshining Disney/Pixar's previous hits Toy Story I and II and Monsters, Inc., as well as its competing summer blockbusters. "Finding Nemo" surfaced as a characteristic Disney epic adventure and heart-warming coming of age tale with resplendent twists. The plot follows a young clown fish, Nemo (Alexander Gould), who is separated from his father, Marlin (Albert Brooks), by the human intervention of a scuba diver and held captive in the office fish tank of a Sydney, Australia dentist (Bill Hunter). Nemo is rescued through the joint efforts of exotic, yet familiarly goofy, ironically down-to-earth, and cleverly caricatured populations of marine creatures. Seagulls, pelicans, turtles, manta rays, jellyfish, squid, starfish, sharks, whales, lobsters, other curious crustaceans, and a glorious array of tropical fish in all configurations and designs animate the film's lavish oceanic world. The creatures are not only strikingly heterogeneous in appearance, but also have international accents or dialects and personas that convey a variety of social styles. This cast of characters, their tongue-in-cheek, witty dialogue, and appropriately colorful depictions add to the appeal and smash success of the film, as vivid and illusionistic artistry positions the viewer as a visually awed undersea explorer

Review: Felstiner, M. (2005). Out of joint: a private & public story of arthritis. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press

In Out of Joint: A Private & Public Story of Arthritis, Mary Felstiner tackles the epic task of writing about bodily pain. This "healing history" is a part medical, part autobiographical, and part cultural analysis (which prove hard to separate), of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a treatable but incurable, autoimmune disease that inflames and swells the joints, wears down cartilage, and produces consequential impairments and fatigue. Of the many forms of arthritis affecting 70 million adults, or 1 in 3 Americans, rheumatoid is the second most common and the most severe, causing chronic, unpredictable, and debilitating pain. Inspired by this historian's inquiry and inability to find personal narratives of her disease, the book provides important research, such as analyses of biblical, literary, and historical themes of arthritis, as well as the history of medical treatments and privatization of arthritis from 1940 to present. However, the book's draw is Felstiner's personal voice and its process of going public

Review: Walker, Pamela K., Moving Over the Edge: Artists with Disabilities Take the Leap. Davis, CA: MH Media, Inc., 2005

Moving over the edge captures the dynamism of the Berkeley/San Francisco Bay area during the disability rights and arts movements of the 1970s — 1990s, in which Pamela Kay Walker has played multiple roles, as activist, educator, radio host, performing artist, talent agent, video producer, administrative leader, poet, and most recently, historian. The book contextualizes many events informatively, chronicling the Independent Living movement, key laws leading up to ADA, and the formations of Axis Dance Company, Wry Crips theater group, and the Superfest Film Festival. Walker profiles key artists whose work has transformed representations of disability, extended definitions of art, and showcased performance as a survival strategy that transcends the stage. By providing such background and current information, Walker produces a vital resource book of visual, literary, and performing artists

Little Displays: The Photographs of Ricardo Gil

Ricardo Gil is a little person who photographs his family and lifestyle. I compare Gil's images to images of little people drawn from fine art, the freak show, and popular culture. Gil's photographs express dwarfism as an embodied perspective and subject position

Music to My (Deaf) Ears: The Installation Work of Joseph Grigely

The installations of artist and literary theorist Joseph Grigely compose memories, mannerisms, messages, (mis)communications, and music to explore the perceptions of and interfaces between deaf and non-deaf worlds. Grigely has been deaf since the age of ten. His visual and literary works exhibit memory and communication as multi-sensual and fragmented, while they deconstruct stereotypes of deafness