careworn & coil (2023)

My body moves on crip time, meaning, it decides when it wants to move, it decides when I need to slow down and when it’s time to go. I experience space and time in a completely different way than most do. I’ve learned to live through the discomfort, but this is my attempt at being vulnerable with you. Let’s reevaluate our perceptions of private versus public life. I want you to understand that it’s not pretty, it’s raw and it’s ugly. In the words of Mia Mingus, I would rather be “ugly—magnificently ugly” than “beautiful” because I am flawed and sometimes need the space to remember that. I move on crip time, as breathing hurts from my ribs that have been inflamed for weeks. I move on crip time because I am too anxious to face the world today. So I stay in my space until I feel it is time to leave.

I watch the seasons change from my window, I watch the sun kiss my pigmented skin.

I've built my world for you, I’ve reconstructed my space.

Proof 29 – Gallery 44; Toronto, Canada
Holly Chang, Neeko Paluzzi, Christina Oyawale

Curated by Lillian O’Brien Davis

In Proof 29, artists Holly Chang, Christina Oyawale and Neeko Paluzzi present installations that place their photographic practices within expanded spatial and material contexts, as their work moves from intimate specificity into the sphere of collective meaning-making. These openings correlate also to the artists’ shared investment in the open-ended, the non-linear and the indeterminate.

“The concept of crip time involves both the ways that disability and illness shape experience of time and the necessity of deconstructing notions of progressive linearity that cannot account for or contain disabled existence. The attention to light and shadow in Oyawale’s photographs distill one such experience: how days spent in the bedroom make the familiarity of recurring sunlight patterns another way to mark time’s passage. Pushing against frameworks of limitation and deficiency, the artist’s depiction of their intimate space conveys how much can be encompassed within its walls.” – Talia Golland, process/processing

Installation Photos by Darren Rigo