Each year, we commission a new artist to create a unique graphic for the creativeconnector.art landing page that centers around the words: "The Future is Accessible".
We are thrilled to post this year's featured commissioned artwork by Harmeet Rehal. Harmeet's vision was rooted in the concept of a “crip oasis”—a place of refuge, rest, and empowerment for all crip, especially crip-of-color kin.
Harmeet Rehal describes themselves as a trans, Disabled, and fat Sikh-Panjabi, multidisciplinary artist, educator, access worker and community organizer.
Through illustration, textile art, and collage, Harmeet tends to the messy archives of their intergenerationally disabled family full of artists and survivors. They also explore pandemic grief, and the cripping of normative design.
Harmeet's work has been shown at the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Spadina Museum, Workman Arts, and they have completed artist residencies at YTB Gallery, Creative Connector, National accessArts Centre and Whippersnapper Gallery.
Currently, they are the co-lead for Digizine, a covid-cautious zine residency for Deaf and Disabled 2SQTBIPoC, and they are engaging in arts-based research in their Critical Disability Studies MA at York University.
You can check out more of Harmeet's work via their website, linked below!
Image Description: A digital graphic by Harmeet Rehal. It depicts a comfy, cozy living room, that features a couch, coffee table and large opened window. "The future is accessible" appears front and center in the Creative Connector brand colours (green, lilac, dark grey). The living room has a variety of disability paraphernalia, including a heating pad, sharps disposable container, boxes full of Covid tests and masks, stim toys, and prescription pills.
Last year's featured artist was Michaela Oteri!
Image Description: A self-portrait of Michaela, a fat white woman with blue/purple dyed hair pulled back into a ponytail. She is wearing a crop top that reads "The Future Is Accessible" and a black plaid skirt. They are holding a pen up in their right hand and sitting in a wheelchair and holding a pair of forearm crutches. The background is blue/purple and art nouveau inspired with vining purple wisteria flowers.
About Michaela
Michaela Oteri (she/they) is a Disabled digital artist who has spent their entire self taught artistic career, drawing from bed. Since the age of 17, Michaela has lived a very hard life full of illnesses, doctors offices, surgeries, hospitals, and treatments that have usually made her sicker. But through all of that she has had her drawing to keep her company.
In 2016 she discovered the Cripple Punk Movement. A Movement centered on disability rights that reject inspirational portrayals and infantilization of those with physical disabilities, created by the late Tyler Trewhella. Michaela soon began the Disabled Beauty Series (formerly the Cripple Punk Series) after realizing the lack of disabled representation that was actually for disabled people, not just of them.
Check out more of Michaela's artwork here.
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