Ocular Occurrences

Image: Ocular Occurrences photograph by Dr. Pam Patterson. Glasses frame by Mel Rapp with a thank you to Sissie He for photographic assistance (5’ x 3’ on satin photo paper).

Reception: September 30, 4:30 to 6 p.m.

Curated by Lauchlin MacQuarrie, with artist Dr. Pam Patterson and designer/author Mel Rapp, this exhibition explores tensions between visual distortion as generative and desirable, and the medical mapping that seeks to contain and define such distortion.

Ocular Occurrences as exhibition, displays, in the vitrines, digital colour prints (that use eye scans, photographs, and topographical maps) overlayed with Amsler grids, designed to engage the viewer with how Dr.Patterson sees and processes images. What, she asks, is the disconnect between medical models and subjective experience? What can a body do to…? The seeming ineffectiveness of this exercise in locating sight is expressed in the accompanying video, Sites of Perception.

Optician, designer and writer Mel Rapp exercises his theory of the intersection of observation, memory, and language by responding, in the vitrine, in writing to Dr.Patterson’s ironic images. In the two facing photos in the annex lounge, one sees closeup Dr.Patterson’s eye framed by one of Rapp’s iconic glassware designs.

Here futility is recovered, redesigned, and transformed.

Ocular Occurrences is one exhibition in the Transformative Access: Activating Disability Desires project supported by OCAD University, WIAprojects, the City of Toronto and the Toronto Arts Council. The other exhibition is from Toronto disability-identified artist Harmeet Rehal whose presentation, Manjas as Mobility Aids, 2023, is on from Sept. 3 to Oct. 30 at Gallery 1313.