The Politics of Breathing: a virtual panel discussion

Wednesday, March 27
12 PM (MST)

With Darrin Martin, Liz Nurenberg, Dominic Quagliozzi, and Aislinn Thomas

Moderated by Amanda Cachia

How is disability art positioned in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic? How is the act of breathing crucial to our understanding of disability, and how does it reveal social structures of oppression?

Join us for a virtual panel discussion with Resistance & Respiration artists Darrin Martin, Liz Nurenberg, Dominic Quagliozzi, and Aislinn Thomas. Moderated by exhibition curator Amanda Cachia, the conversation will explore the four artists’ practices, and their relationship to breathing as artists with disabilities.

This conversation is programmed in conjunction with Resistance & Respiration,  curated by Amanda Cachia and on view at Contemporary Calgary until April 14, 2024.

About the Speakers

 Darrin Martin (he/they)

Darrin Martin engages the synesthetic qualities of perception through video, performance, sculpture, and print-based installations. Influenced by his own experiences with deafness, his projects consider notions of accessibility through the use of tactility, sonic analogies, and/or audio descriptions. His works have screened at the Museum of Modern Art (NY); Pacific Film Archive (CA); Impakt Festival (Netherlands); European Media Art Festival (Germany), among many others. His artworks and installations have exhibited at venues including Grand Central Art Center (CA), Moscow State Vadim Sidur Museum (Russia), McIntosh Gallery (Canada), Krannert Art Museum (IL) and, most recently, at the Ann Arbor Film Festival (MI) and the Saint Joseph’s Art Society in collaboration with Telematic Media Arts (CA). Martin occasionally curates, most recently selections from Electronic Arts Intermix through a crip lens in (Mis)Reading the Image. He is Professor and Co-Chair of the Art and Art History Department at the University of California, Davis. 

Liz Nurenberg (she/her)

Liz Nurenberg (b. 1978) is a Los Angeles based artist. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Grand Valley State University (2003) and a Master of Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate University (2010.) Liz is an Associate Professor in the Foundation department at Otis College of Art and Design. She is a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles. Liz was awarded a fellowship to Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency, a Helen B. Dooley Fellowship at Claremont Graduate University, and received a California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally at such venues as the Holter Museum (Helena, Montana), Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), Elephant Art Space (Los Angeles, CA), HilbertRaum Gallery (Berlin, Germany), Galleri CC (Malmo, Sweden), and the Torrance Art Museum (Torrence, CA).

Dominic Quagliozzi (he/him)

Dominic Quagliozzi received an MFA in Studio Arts from Cal State University, Los Angeles and a BA in Sociology from Providence College. His work is in the permanent collection at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. He has exhibited work in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Providence, Denmark and at Casula Powerhouse Art Centre in New South Wales, Australia. In 2018, he was on the Keynote patient panel at the Nexus Summit for interprofessional care and education at the University of Minnesota. He is on the Arts Council for Creative Healing for Youth in Pain and has given workshops and lectures at the Rhode Island School of Design, UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, USC Keck School of Medicine, Chapman University, Cal State Los Angeles and Cal State Long Beach.

Aislinn Thomas (she/her)

Aislinn Thomas is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes video, performance, sculpture, installation, and text. She culls material from everyday experiences and relationships, creating work that is by turns poignant and absurd. Many of Aislinn’s recent projects respond to disability and standard approaches to access–or the lack thereof. She gratefully works alongside and in the legacy of so many who treat access and survival as spaces for creative acts. Aislinn is a white settler of Ashkenazic and mixed European descent. She is grateful to live and work in Unama’ki, part of Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq covered by the Peace and Friendship treaties.

About the Curator/Moderator

Amanda Cachia (she/her)

Amanda Cachia has an established career profile as a curator, consultant, writer and art historian who specializes in disability art activism across intersectional axes of difference, including gender, race, and sexuality. She is the tenure-track Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of the Masters of Arts in Arts Leadership Graduate Program at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts at the University of Houston, where she also serves as Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Museum and Gallery Management, and the Graduate Certificate in Arts and Health. She is a 2023 grantee of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her second monograph, Hospital Aesthetics: Rescripting Medical Images of Disability. Her first book, The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique, is forthcoming with Temple University Press (2024). Cachia is also the editor of Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation (2022) published by Routledge, which includes over 40 international contributors. She has a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism from the University of California San Diego. Cachia has curated approximately 50 exhibitions, many of which have traveled to cities across the USA, England, Australia and Canada. Cachia previously taught art history, visual culture, and curatorial and exhibition studies at Otis College of Art and Design, California Institute of the Arts, California State University Long Beach, California State University San Marcos and San Diego State University.

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