Artist Profiles

babbel

meesh sara fradkin is a writer, sound artist, and phd candidate in interdisciplinary music technology at mcgill university.

Image by Meesh Sara Fradkin

Pain Pals

Born in 1981, Carmen Papalia is a nonvisual social practice artist with chronic and episodic pain. He uses organizing strategies and improvisation to address his access to public space, art institutions and visual culture. As a convener, he establishes welcoming spaces where disabled, sick and chronically ill people can build capacity for care that they lack on account of governmental failure and medical ableism. His work, which takes forms ranging from collaborative performance to public intervention, is a response to the harms of the Medical Model of Disability.

Papalia holds a Bachelor of Arts from Simon Fraser University and a Master of Fine Arts with a focus in Art & Social Practice from Portland State University.

He is an inaugural fellow of the Crip Tech Incubator via Leonardo: the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. In 2020 Papalia was one of 25 artists who received the Sobey Art Award; in 2019 he was a Sobey long list recipient in the West Coast / Yukon region. His work has been featured at institutions such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Liverpool, Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, the Contemporary Art Gallery, Surrey Art Gallery and Gallery Gachet, among others.

Headshot, image credit: Kristin Lantz 

Total Running Time

Josephine Sales works with systems of reliance and acts of contingency to consider how disability may expand our relational capacity. Engaging perceptual conditions of access, Sales creates site-specific installations based in cinema, sculpture, sound, and performance. The artist's work has been presented at Palais de Tokyo, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kai Matsumiya, New York and The Shed.  Fellowships include Leonardo, International Society for Arts, Sciences and Technology (2021-2023) and Black Box Residency at University of California Irvine Beall Center for Art + Technology (2022-2023).  Sales received an MFA in Photography from Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College and lives and works in New York City

Image credit: Courtesy of the artist

Unseen Sound

Andy Slater (b. 1975 Milford, CT) is a blind Chicago-based media artist, writer, performer, and Disability advocate/loudmouth.
Andy holds a Masters in Sound Arts and Industries from Northwestern University and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a 2022 United States Artists fellow, 2022-2023 Leonardo Crip Tech Incubator fellow and a 2018 3Arts/Bodies of Work fellow at the University of Illinois Chicago

He is a teaching artist with the Atlantic Center for the Arts’ Young SoundSeekers program, Midwest Society For Acoustic Ecology, and Creative Users’ Sensory Shift program.

Andy’s current work focuses on advocacy for accessible art and technology, Alt-Text for sound and image, the phonology of the blind body, spatial audio for extended reality, and sound design for film, dance, and digital scent design..

Andy was the feature on an episode of BBC Outlook in 2023. In 2020 Andy was acknowledged for his art by the New York Times in their article, “28 Ways To Learn About Disability Culture.”
His research on Crypto Acoustic Auditory Non-Hallucination was published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern volume 61. Andy’s audio description production for Alison O’Daniel’s film,” The Tuba Thieves”, was featured at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. He was music director for the 2022-2023 Lit y Luz festival in Mexico City. His sound description of Molly Joyce’s, “Side By Side”, was commissioned by Carnegie Hall in 2022.
Andy has been published in Array: The International Computer Music Journal, Curating Access:Disability Art Activism AndCreative Accommodation, English Studies in Canada, the Chicago Reader, There Plant Eyes (Godin 2021), and Jane magazine.
He has exhibited and performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Fonoteca Nacional in Mexico City, , the Contemporary Jewish Museum SF, Massechussettes Museum of Contemporary Art, American Writers and Publishers conference, Transmediale Festival Berlin, Kinetic Light’s “Wired”, Technosonics Festival University of Virginia, , Ian Potter Museum of Art Melbourne, Meyer Sound Lab SF, Critical Distance Toronto, Gallery 400 Chicago, Experimental Sound Studios, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Inclusive Dance Festival..

Andy is a member of the 3Arts Disability Culture Leadership Initiative New Art City accessibility board, and the founder of the Society of Visually Impaired Sound Artists..

And last but not least, he is a member of the acid-soul band, the Velcro Lewis Group, and performs solo as electronic melting pot, Calculator Font.

Image Credit: Tressa Slater

Song Without Words

Olivia Ting is a hard of hearing visual artist, designer, photographer, video projectionist, and pianist. She explores audial perception without hearing and the intersections of sound perception interpreted as speech, noise, and music (organized sound). Without her hearing aid and cochlear implant, she perceives nearly no sounds, so visuals stand in for the audio that she is familiar with, but hears and not hears. Formerly a pre-med major at Pomona College, she went on to a second degree in graphic design at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. She worked for design and branding agencies in New York City for several years before returning to San Francisco, where her work expanded to collaborative video projections with dance choreographers and museum exhibits. She received her MFA Art Practice from U.C. Berkeley and is currently freelancing and developing new work reconnecting with her music background.

Image credit: Olivia Ting