Amanda Cachia

Amanda Cachia (amanda_cachia@hotmail.com) is from Sydney, Australia and is graduating from the Masters in Visual & Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco in spring, 2012. Her MA thesis, entitled What Can A Body Do? Inscribing and Adjusting a Disabled Experience in Contemporary Art will form the basis of an exhibition to be curated by Cachia and hosted by Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, MA from October 26 – December 16, 2012. Cachia received her first Masters in Creative Curating from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2001 and will embark on a PhD in Art History, Theory & Criticism at the University of California, San Diego in Fall, 2012. Her dissertation will focus on the intersection of disability and contemporary art. She will also participate in the upcoming Arts Inclusion: Disability, Design, Curation residency in June at UC Irvine organized by the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Cachia held the position Director/Curator of the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada from 2007-2010, and has curated approximately 30 exhibitions over the last ten years in London, New York, Oakland and various cities across Australia and Canada. Her curatorial practice revolves around interdisciplinary themes within a social justice framework. Cachia has been the Chair of the Dwarf Artists Coalition for the Little People of America since 2007 and will be giving papers at various conferences throughout 2012, including Extraordinary Bodies/Extraordinary Minds, City University of New York (March), Open Engagement: Art + Social Practice, Portland State University (May) and Society for Disability Studies, Denver (June). She recently organized What Can A Body Do? Investigating Disability in Contemporary Art, which included 7 disabled scholars and artists discussing important issues on a round table regarding the representation of the disabled subject in visual culture held on February 17, 2012. The event also included Blind Field Shuttle by Carmen Papalia, a walking tour on the CCA SF campus (see images attached). This event was funded by the CCA President’s Diversity Steering Group, the Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies and Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Grant Program. Documentation from the event can be found at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtSTRj2s9H8 (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKwkawC-Zxw (Part 2)

Other links:
http://deyoung.famsf.org/deyoung/calendar/access-advisors-open-house-and-disability-arts-festival-0
http://proartsgallery.org/exhibitions/2011_medusa.php
http://mindthegap.dunlopartgallery.org/
http://dailyserving.com/2011/10/world-disclosers-medusas-mirror-at-pro-arts-gallery/
http://www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/entertainment/story.html?id=37aacea6-7eb0-4573-a449-9955afe6e62d&p=1

Recent Happenings:

Photo Credit for Blind Field Shuttle images: Jordan Reznick

About Amanda Cachia’s Thesis Project

What Can a Body Do? Inscribing and Adjusting a Disabled Experience in Contemporary Art
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The contemporary artists Laura Swanson and Corban Walker challenge dominant cultural perceptions of scale, size, and proportion as they visually inscribe their sculptures with their experience of dwarfism. The artists move away from problematic figures such as the midget or the freak as portrayed within historical and contemporary Western visual discourses. Their complex, embodied forms adjust and destabilize reductive representations of the disabled body. Complex embodiment offers layers of inquiry so that categories of difference, identity, and disadvantage can no longer be essentialized, thus giving disabled artists greater knowledge and power over their own bodies. The theories of the body without organs by Deleuze and Guattari (1980) and the anthropological imagination by Mieke Bal (2010) assist in understanding Swanson and Walker’s work and provide an opportunity to reconceptualize assumptions and practices of disabled representation. Disability must be inscribed and adjusted as an essential aspect of human diversity rather than a pathological aberration within contemporary art.