Turning into a small room off the main gallery, visitors will find an intimate setting to contemplate the works of M Eifler, aka BlinkPopShift and Chun Shan (Sandie) Yi. The enclosed room stages the private and domestic spaces in which disabled people participate in self-sustaining, interdependent networks of care. Eifler and Yi, in their own radically divergent ways, manifest the often invisible rituals and daily rhythms of self-advocacy, identity formation, and memory that take place behind closed doors.

 

In Masking Machine, M Eifler’s playful photography series, an AI algorithm creates different filters of phone selfies of the artist. In a new work they premiered at Recoding CripTech, M Eifler co-created Prosthetic Memory with Steve Sedlmayr: an interactive multimedia installation powered by machine learning that constructs a searchable memory bank. At a desk modeled after the artist’s home workspace, visitors can turn the pages of M Eifler’s daily journal — the computer will search the memories associated with that page and play a recorded video memory. 

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Memory is an equally powerful motif of Chun Shan (Sandie) Yi’s work too, though her practice crafts organic materials into wearable garments, accessories and footwear.  This is present in Skinny, a work that honors Yi’s crip sister Rahnee Patrick and her epidermal cycle of regeneration. Hairy Undies and Crip Couture present intimate bodily adornments that challenge narratives of disability as asexual, undesirable or pathologized, and instead seek to transform our ideals of beauty.