disability – this was now

“A SENSE OF WONDER”

A Sense of Wonder is a collaborative project that seeks to cultivate creative, inclusive, and imaginative processes, which connect with and express d/Deaf culture through the convergence of art and social practice.

A Sense of Wonder is led by Guelph-based interdisciplinary artist Dawn Matheson in collaboration with d/Deaf and hard of hearing kids and youth from across Southern Ontario. In Wonder, the kids are the boss.

Commissioned by the Art Gallery of Guelph and supported by Ed Video Media Arts Centre, Wonder engages multimedia, performance, and video to provide access and insight into d/Deaf arts in an exploration of the presence of deafness over the absence of sound.

Fresh off, a stellar exhibit last year at Art Gallery of Guelph and a Downtown Guelph projection. A Sense of Wonder Videos were also screened at Toronto’s Hot Doc’s Cinema for the Toronto International Deaf Film and Arts Festival!! WOWZA. WHAT an honour!
Toronto International Deaf Film and Arts Festival

2018 will see one of the films featured in KW’s CAFKA art festival! Projected on Kitchener City Hall’s Cube!

Dawn Matheson is now working at EC Drury School for the Deaf’s Grade 11 and 12 media studies class coming up with new works for YEAR TWO. Thanks to Ontario Arts Council Artist in Education Grant!

4 films in total were created as part of YEAR ONE of Dawn Matheson’s A Sense of Wonder collaboration with d/Deaf youth throughout Ontario.
-We’ve run around in the forest with GO PRO cameras making movies at The Guelph Outdoor School (IF A TREE FALLS)

-We’ve felt music wearing vibration vests: put our heads in tubas, hugged double basses in FEELS LIKE MUSIC (You will experience the vibration vests at the exhibition!)

Video Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-SUssd6WXI&feature=youtu.be

-The Grade 6,7,8 Deaf Plus class from Drury School teaches ASL in ALL TOGETHER NOW

-And a 9-year-old Guelph girl performs an ASL interpretation of e.e. cummings’ stunning poem [i carry your heart with me (i carry it in] in an outdoor projection downtown

Below is an old blog post from a site for a larger project called One Mile Square. It tells the story of my contributions to a a community art project run by the Musagetes Foundation. I was an artist commissioned to create a local project. I chose to work with Cheryl Turner, a great Guelph woman whom I met at Action Read Literacy where she was learning reading skills.
Cheryl lives with a health condition that affects her day-to-day life in the community and in her own body. Her mom has the same condition.
Together, we decided to explore what makes Cheryl’s day-to-day livable. What does she depend upon for happiness?
Turned out squirrels were a big factor.
We created a video together. Then we created an event to share the video.
Since many of Cheryl’s contacts were through Action Read, we included the gang there in a live ‘bedtime slumber party’ where her colleagues read bedtime stories to children in the community in a public place (we picked the Via Train Station so we could have lots of traffic coming through and new people to engage). We decided to have everyone bring sleeping bags and lie on the floor so they could watch projections of the book pages above on the ceiling as the stories were read to them by adult learners.
Then we screened our video!
See below for the long version of this story originally shared in a blog post on Musagetes home page!

SLUMBER PARTY at the TRAIN STATION / September 1, 2011

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Tag: disability

A Sense of Wonder Films at Toronto International Deaf Film and Arts Festival

So Much Depends Upon