Spurred by calls for disability justice and the desire for a more equitable and intersectional future, the disability arts movement is pushing forward with renewed political intention to disrupt conventional understandings of the arts.

Tangled Art + Disability and the AGO have formed a new partnership to showcase the possibilities of a world that honours access, disability and difference. We are excited to present videos by six artists from Tangled’s community that showcase their artistic practices in response to artwork in the AGO Collection.

Relax with Sample 01

Valentin Brown introduces you to “Sample 01,” an Unknown Specimen found adrift in the “Body Farm.” In this video footage, Valentin demonstrates some ways of practicing closed captioning and audio description. When it is safe to do so, Valentin invites you to touch an Unknown Specimen just like this one.

My goal with this video was to think out loud about how captioning, audio, and visuals can be in conversation with each other, in a way that is hopefully poetic rather than didactic. Throughout making the video, I went back and forth between allowing each of these three elements to take the lead in creating a sense of tension and release. I intentionally played around with different styles of captions, and the timing in which they appear, to show how certain factors affect an individual's ability to read them (their level of sightedness, ability to take in information, how fast or slow they read English, etc.)--so it's possible that there are parts of the video that are harder to take in than others.

Using mixed media images, tactile sculpture, and audio narrative, Valentin Brown pieces together an ongoing mythology of monsters that reframes his experience of madness with awe, humour, and hope—and weaves accessibility right at the heart of it all. In 2019, Valentin was awarded the Won Lee Fellowship and the Intergenerational LGBT Artist Residency, and exhibited his first solo show, Body Farm, with Tangled Art + Disability. Valentin will participate in Centre3’s 2021 Emerging Artist Residency and will show new solo exhibits of Body Farm at The Art Gallery of Windsor in 2022 and Hamilton Artists Inc. in 2023.

Website: https://www.valentinbrown.com/

Closed captioning is available in this recording.

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