Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires @ The Window Box Gallery
This project, spanning 2024-2025, features the work of the artists Harmeet Rehal (Sept-Nov), Sunshine Tormé Johnson (Dec-Feb) and Hollis McConkey (March-May), and is curated by Mason Smart with Jack Hawk. This page serves as an aggregate of the information associated with this exhibition series. This exhibition was produced with the support of the Toronto Arts Council and with the mentorship of Dr. Pam Patterson and Gallery 1313.
All photos by John Oughton.
Harmeet Rehal: ਪੀੜੀ/Pidis as grounding (ਮੰਜਾ/Manjas as Mobility Aids)
2023. Black milk crates, repurposed saris and dupattas, 12” x 12” x 11” (single milk crate)
September 3rd 2024 - November 30th 2024
"ਮੰਜਾ/Manjas are Panjabi day beds traditionally made with a simple wooden frame and hand-woven, colourful rope. ਪੀੜੀ/Pidi as grounding is an extensions of Harmeet’s larger work (ਮੰਜਾ/Manjas as Mobility Aids) that reconstructs Manjas through milk crates that are bound together to form a daybed.
Traditionally, Pidis are the shorter, squarer versions of Manjas, and are sitting stools. In contrast to western spatial design, Manjas are found in private and public shared spaces, allowing rest to be collective and ongoing.
Pidis in specific can be another seating choice, and often are used as supports during labour and care-work. In the diaspora, I grew up witnessing milk crates in factories, cleaning supply closets, kitchen fridges, alleys, and flea markets becoming our Pidis.
This is a type of working-class and racialized “access” hacking that recalibrates the normative design and purpose of milk crates into an access tool/mobility aid. It allows for a type of grounding during hours of under-valued work, and these softened tops with woven Panjabi textiles becomes a love-letter to invisibilized labour."
~ Harmeet Rehal
Question-Based Didactic
- Have you ever worked in a kitchen? Has the long shift of standing begun to hurt?
- How would you transform an everyday object to allow yourself to find a second use in it that adds something good to your life?
- How would you like a mobility aid to make you feel inside?
- What kind of fabric would you put on top of your Milk Crate Manja or Pidi?
- Imagine putting these works together to create a larger seating or lying down area. What kind of pattern would you put them in? How would you celebrate resting?
- How else can these objects be used or changed through your creative mind?
Sunshine Tormé Johnson: Home to Heal, Water Being, Whack-a-Queer
Home to Heal: 2023. Inkjet print on paper, 14" x 24"
Water Being and Whack-a-Queer: 2023. Laser print on paper, 11" x 17"
December 1st 2024 - February 28th 2025
“ "Home To Heal" captures a profound moment of ancestral and spiritual practice, illustrating the power of manifestation that is practiced by some people of the African diaspora. The image depicts a spell where individuals inscribe a desire onto a bay leaf with a marker then igniting it to invoke the assistance of source and spirit to transform the intention into the present.”
“In "Home To Heal," I captured a pivotal moment of hope and resilience, as I boldly claimed the necessity of stable housing to navigate the mental and physical perils of homelessness. This photograph encapsulates a journey towards survival, where the act of manifestation becomes a beacon of healing amidst adversity.”
“ “Water Being” was created in reflection of my relationship with the land that I am settled on: Tkaronto - the place in the water where the trees are standing. It explores themes of connecting with the only home I’ve ever known through water while making space for the fact that my peoples have been removed from the waters that wash to the shores of my ancestral lands.”
“Connecting with water has always been healing, joyful and emotional for me. I consider water to be sacred as there is no life without water. My connection to water also feels ancestral to me because many of my ancestors lived on an island or on coastal lands. It also very emotional because I have ancestors who died while they were being forcibly transferred from West Africa to the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade.”
“ “Whack-a-Queer” was created to capture stories and emotions that I didn’t know how to articulate yet of my experience living in a transitional house for 2SLGBTQIA+ youth. This experience left me further traumatized from the abuse that I was subjected to directly and witnessed before they took my housing away leaving me houseless. This piece illustrates the abuse of power that often occurs within the shelter systems that target vulnerable populations while weaponizing inclusive language to create a false sense of safety and gaslight clients' experiences.”
- Sunshine Tormé Johnson
Housing as Health: Sunshine Tormé Johnson and Transformative Access
Sunshine creates with a potent balance of sharing himself and his experiences and creating images that are personally resonant. There are harmonic intimacies in “Home to Heal” and “Water Being”, the former being a first-person POV of a spell to bring stable housing into Sunshine’s life. The warmth of fire and implied proximity to Sunshine himself performing the spell conjures an enclosed, safer space. The latter challenges the viewer to be at ease with the Water Being’s naked comfort in and born from the water. The mythological bodyform of the Water Being links it to a personification of natural forces, as if the lake is also observing those who would find meaning in it. There is an intensity to Sunshine’s work, invoked through how he has manipulated the gaze of the viewer.
“Whack-A-Queer” centres on communicating Sunshine’s experience with transitional housing. The whack-a-mole imagery describes neglect, the ‘moles’ an exponential number of failures of staff to be enabled to perform their work resulting in lack of care for residents and at times violence. This visual memoir succinctly shows the dangers of leading organizations for a certain population without the leadership of the population being served. It is a cautionary tale of what will happen when the transformative maxim “by us, for us” is not taken seriously.
The desire to self determine, speak truth, and heal holistically in the ways that are endemic to his own histories and experiences are the disability desires Sunshine Johnson animates, as well as a focus on placemaking as an essential part of healing, or, as “Whack-a-Queer” shows, engendering further trauma.
Hollis McConkey: Dermatillomanic Pixie Dream Girl
2025. Embroidery thread on Aida cloth, approx. 12.5" x 16.2"
Written Accompaniment by Hollis McConkey
Stinging, tightening, itchiness surround the black hole that leads to nowhere and sucks nothing in except time. The only warning of its emergence is the antsy, frantic energy that I never succeed at containing. Firm white and gooey red emerge as signals telling me to go away, look away, run, but like the green glow that warns sleeping beauty to turn around and resist the spindle’s seduction, it does not register. There is no option. It’s got me, strangling me and pushing iron rods slowly up into my legs, into my hips, fusing my pelvis and hips together as if injected by glue that seeps between my ligaments, fastening my joints. Stars appear and begin to push me around; I’m floating, the grey and blue humidity become denser than me and move me closer and further from the ground while my fellow traveler desperately clings to my disappearing leg in an attempt (albeit selfishly motivated) to bring me back, two opposing magnets whose push and pull are not evenly matched. The flesh of my body is sucked into my eyes and all I am is two floating orbs with nowhere to be and nowhere to hide, exposed to each other in the ultimate form of pause. Except there are four of us and 20 of them, and only one of two surfaces on which to remain grounded or disappear forever. We’re all here together taking residence in the black hole, unable to be separated yet anxiously waiting for that sweet exit when my body leaks back out of my eyes and I am blinded, spilling all over the hands I didn’t know I had and flooding the air around me. I emerge to find myself turned inside out by the black hole, kidnapped by the stars and stripped, shivering. There is nothing left of me in me; it has flooded the basement as a dirty metallic ghost who reminds me that I was gone, yet again, when my home was ransacked and I have been left with the wreckage.
Curator's Note
Hollis McConkey’s embroidered work displays her commitment to anti-extractive values. The incompleteness of the work is a bold testament to her refusal to let work contribute to worsening her experience of illness, and welcomed by a curation perspective that prioritizes artist knowledge in production. The art space has become, as a body of activity that exalts human experience, a milieu that can accept this kind of refusal as valuable. Transformative Access means radically accepting fallibility and ongoing negotiation of labour expectations.
Artist Bios
Harmeet Rehal as a fat, trans, Disabled, Sikh-Panjabi multidisciplinary artist, educator, and organizer, uses illustration, collage, painting, and textile arts and facilitates related community arts programming. Their art research and practices address: pandemic care networks, intergenerational crip archives, hacking normative design, and Panjabi survivor-hood.
https://harmeet-rehal.com/pages/about-me
Sunshine Torme Johnson is a dynamic facilitator, artist, and community member. A Black, disabled, gender-diverse, and queer individual, he embraces his fluidity through his art. Sunshine creates transformative pieces using multiple mediums including digital illustration, photography, videography, collaging and crafting. https://www.instagram.com/transcending_sunshine?igsh=cDc1N3VmNndybHZ2
Hollis McConkey (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Ontario, on the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, and the Huron-Wendat. She completed her BFA at OCAD U in Toronto in 2023 and is set to complete her MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London in the summer of 2024. Hollis’ work has been included in exhibitions at 113Research (2023), EMS Gallery (2023), OCAD U’s annual GradEx (2023), among other spaces. In 2021 she was awarded the Joseph Muscat Scholarship, given annually to a student in the drawing and painting program who creates boundary-breaking and unique work, as well as participated in the What Moves You? online residency with the University of the Arts London, Camberwell College of Arts. https://hollismcconkey.format.com
Create Your Own Website With Webador