Try to locate Lady
Multidisciplinary Worldbuilder
Biography:
Emily De Boer is an artist, athlete and activist. Mastering in Fine Arts, competing on the Canadian Women’s Para Ice Hockey team and volunteering within her community. Devoted to inclusion, equitable care and the building of accessible spaces, whether physical or experiential, she teaches those around her how to better build communities everyone can access and grow within. Devoted to her community, she invests her time dismantling barriers and reimagining the spaces that have historically been inaccessible for certain bodies.
Artist Statement:
I am a physically disabled multidisciplinary worldbuilder, constructing crip-centric liberated zones through photography, photomontage, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. My work forms surreal, radically inclusive environments through which my alter ego, Lady, can travel. Liberated from the oppression of hostile architecture ubiquitous to urban environments, Lady existing as a single breezeblock, defies the truth of her structure, traveling freely throughout my constructions.
Through collage I am building an accessible place to play, to explore uninhibited, and to process the exclusion these hostile structures implement. Using the motifs that obstruct access to subvert understandings of hostility and inaccess, I find beauty in the reappropriation of these hostile structures. Activating traditions of Neo-Dadaism, my work is formed with a similar rejection of the status quo. Impairments are not disabling; social and architectural barriers are. Until design considers a more radical inclusion, I reject the principles of which that keep me excluded.
I rely on chance and the collaboration of my community to source my material. Collecting and claiming the hostile, ephemeral and esoteric motifs from the urban landscape, I decide what is worthy of admiration and intervention. Fascinated by the perceptual tendency of apophenia, I am interested in seeing how the alteration and juxtaposition of these forms subvert one’s understanding of accessible design, by showing its absurdity.
