ABSTRACT
Matt Bodett’s work, created during his 2017 3Arts Residency at UIC, provides a rich case study of how disabled artists’ phenomenological exploration of interpersonal relationships in crip time can generate aesthetic possibilities and participate in disability community building. Since the late 1980s and 1990s, the disability art movement in the United States has established itself and gained momentum. Alison Kafer’s political/relational model of disability, as described in her book Feminist, Queer, Crip, is an attempt to move the field of disability studies beyond the polarizing and mutually exclusive paradigms of the medical model and social model. Alison. Kafer explains that disability is conceptualized in terms of temporality: frequency, incidence, occurrence. Bodett makes art as a means of understanding and sharing his own experiences of schizophrenia. While Bodett’s work explicitly addresses his experiences of mental illness, he had not yet come to identify as disabled, nor had he been introduced to critical conversations around disability culture.
