Extraordinary Bodies: Art, Illness and Disability

Location

Saints Tekakwitha and Serra Hall, Humanities Center, 200

Free

This conversation with artists and writers Bhavna Mehta, Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio and Elizabeth Rooklidge will explore visual art as a vehicle for disability aesthetics, which they use as a lens — by turns critical and lyrical — to examine their own intimate experience with disability and larger political and ethical issues around representation of disability in culture.

Bhavna Mehta works with paper, cutting and embroidering it to tell stories that combine figurative imagery with botanical motifs, text and shadows. Mehta has exhibited widely in Southern California and is the recipient of an Individual Artists Fellowship from the California Arts Council and a Creative Catalyst Grant from The San Diego Foundation. 

Artist Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio works in oil painting, drawing, murals, installation and public art to explore the concept of time and the transitions of change through the kaleidoscopic perspectives of her individual narrative, astrophysics, philosophy and memory. She has exhibited her artwork internationally, in the Dominican Republic, Mexico and the United States. Elizabeth Rooklidge is a cultural practitioner and educator whose work focuses on embodiment and chronic illness. Her writing and visual art on the subject has appeared in publications such as Able Zine, Lassitude Zine, Variable West, Dismantle Magazine and HereIn Journal, and at institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

This is a hybrid event taking place in both the Humanities Center and on Zoom at meeting ID: 956 6763 8160.

Bhavna Mehta | Artist
Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio | Art, Architecture + Art History
Elizabeth Rooklidge | Art, Architecture + Art History