Strange Fire

Q&A: Shannon Finnegan

By Lodoe Laura | September 17, 2020

Shannon Finnegan is a multidisciplinary artist making work about accessibility and disability culture. They have done projects with the Banff Centre, the High Line, Tallinn Art Hall, Nook Gallery, MCA Denver, and the Wassaic Project. Shannon has spoken about their work at the Brooklyn Museum, Data & Society, School for Poetic Computation, The 8th Floor, and The Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library. In 2018, they received a Wynn Newhouse Award and participated in Art Beyond Sight’s Art + Disability Residency. In 2019, they were an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam. Shannon lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Lodoe Laura: Shannon, thanks for chatting with me. I saw your work in person for the first time at the solo exhibition of your work at Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG). I was impressed by how the exhibition was built around the usability and accessibility of space. For folks who might not be familiar with your work, I’d love to start off by asking about your origin story–how you initially became involved in your artistic practice, and how that practice has developed in the last few years.

Shannon Finnegan: I’ve been involved in creative projects my whole life. I've also been disabled my whole life. Experiences I had in college were turning points for me with both of those things. The art class I took helped me understand the ways that my art practice could be a place where I was exploring and thinking more conceptually. 

When I grew up I was pretty isolated from other disabled people, even though I grew up in Berkeley, California, which is a hub of disability organizing. When I went to college there was another student who had a somewhat similar disability to me. Getting to know them was really wild for me because all of these things that I had thought were just my own personal experiences I realized were shared. These experiences were culturally-shaped and socially-shaped. That was a big shift for me in terms of understanding myself as belonging to a disability community or culture. 

Disability has always been a part of my art practice though often in ways were a little bit more subtle. Five or six years ago, I started to feel like I wanted to address that part of my experience more directly. The first project that I did was a self-portrait. I was looking at mainstream media and culture and thinking: I'm not seeing my experience reflected there. So I started from what I knew in terms of my own experience and made a series of text drawings that each featured a thought, moment, memory, or experience that I'd had. I was thinking about all the messiness in my experience–things that are hard, things that are weird, things that are funny, and mixing them all together. 

One of the things that I realized in that process was that I was really interested in centring other disabled people as the audience of my work; that's really who I'm addressing the work to. I started to research access; because, in order to have disabled people be the audience in my work, I needed to build accessible settings and formats for the work. Access isn't always present in existing art spaces. 

In tandem with that came rethinking my own access needs, and the ways that I had internalized trying to ask for as little as possible, trying to push through things, ignoring my own access needs. That's what a lot of my work is around now: thinking about access as something that is creative, collaborative and based in relationships. Access as ongoing and evolving.

LL: One of the things that drew me to your practice was the principles of participation and protest that I think are inherent to your work. These ideas are related, but I want to talk about each separately. I want to start with this idea of participation. 

While I was a student, I was a gallery attendant at a contemporary art space. One of the things I was tasked with in this position was to enforce these rules of the gallery: no touching, no running, no laying down. These types of bodily restrictions that are essential to the white cube’s configuration as a passive space. One of the things that I find interesting in your work is your reimagining of the gallery experience as one that requires the visitor to engage in participatory action. I wonder if you can talk about this idea of participation in the way you structure your work in a traditional exhibition space, like CUAG. 

SF: The invitation to participate in that show was around places to rest: seating and cushions on the floor where people could lie down, and benches and chairs to sit on. That series of works came out of my experience going to galleries and museums and feeling so tired from all of the standing and walking. There was a real scarcity of places to rest. I was thinking about the ways that galleries and museums often pretend or posture towards being public spaces, being community spaces, being spaces to gather, but that something as simple as a bench is just not part of that understanding.

More generally, one of the roles of access is to be able to be together–whether that’s through being together in person, being together virtually, and also this type of togetherness that I think comes from shared experience. Inaccessibility isolates disabled people from each other. I think this one of the ways that ableism sustains itself; we are told our experiences are personal or individualized and not shared and culturally-shaped, and we often aren’t able to meet, talk, hangout, and compare notes. One of the ways that I think about participation broadly: connecting disabled people or creating opportunities for connection feels like a way of pushing back against some of those ableist structures.

LL: On the subject of participation, you’ve also invited the participation of collaborators in the creation of your work, often friends and family. For example, your aunt helped you to sew the floor cushions in the CUAG exhibition. I wonder if you could speak about this type of participation and the role of collaboration in the way you design your practice? 

SF: Yes, this is actually an area that I've been thinking about a lot recently, and it's a part of my practice that I’m thinking of exploring even more. The idea of interdependence is really central to disability community and disability culture. I have been thinking about the ways that my work is not possible without the work of other disabled artists and writers and thinkers. There's this huge ecosystem of work that I have learned from–historically and from my peers and colleagues–and my work would not be possible without that. 

I don't want my work to be understood in isolation. Even more so in the future, I want to bring that ecosystem into the work itself; so that it’s clear when you're experiencing the work that there are these interdependent relationships between me and other artists and family and friends. This is contrary to the way that art is sometimes presented: where the artist is named as the sole creator. We know that, behind the scenes, lots of artists have studios where there are lots of different people involved in the production or creation of work. Plus all of the other relationships in their lives that make the work possible. For example, childcare, food prep, therapy, friendship, public infrastructure. Interdependence is something that I'm thinking about a lot.

LL: I love Self-Portrait and Portrait of Danielle Durschlag. What was your process of developing the texts for these works? 

SF: Self-Portrait came first. I had been feeling like I wanted to make work about my disability and couldn't find the right form. I had been doing a lot of work with text drawings before and realized: Oh, I can use the structure that I've been using before to approach this new topic. And then it was like the floodgates broke, and I very quickly wrote all of the text for that project. There were a lot of memories and thoughts that were right there–at the surface. 

I started with a self-portrait because that’s the experience that I have access to and know. I'm excited about making portraits with other people who identify as disabled or chronically ill. Danielle Durschlag is a friend of mine. We had a couple of conversations about our bodies and how we relate to them. I was talking with her about the project and she was like, “I'd really love to go through this process with you.” 

I hope to continue this series and I think the form of the collaboration might change a lot depending on who I'm working with; I don't think that it has to be a set process at all. With Danielle, I developed a series of questions–things like, Are there certain thoughts that you cycle through or come back to? When you think about your body what are some memories that come up? Have you spent much time in hospitals or medical environments? Are there things that you’ve noticed about those places or experiences? Are there daily or routine things that you do to care for yourself? I had a whole list of questions that we talked through. I took notes during our conversation and then drafted the text. Then there was some back-and-forth with where we worked together to find the ones that she responded to, or ones she didn’t like, or ideas that were very central to her experience that she felt weren't represented… And so we went back and forth like that and for a little while until we got to a set of texts that felt good and then I made the drawings.

LL: In the CUAG exhibition, you also developed a non-visual text, which builds on your work around alt-text. You used a computer to generate image descriptions for the visual works in the exhibition. The descriptions the computer’s AI provides wildly misinterprets, or misdescribes, what you’ve presented it. Can you tell me about the genesis of this alt-text practice that you’ve initiated?

SF: The alt-text at CUAG was actually the initiative of the curatorial team, Heather Anderson and Fiona Wright; it was something that they brought in when we were thinking about supporting text for the exhibition. But that was because I've been doing this now multi-year project about alt-text with a collaborator, Bojana Coklyat. For me, the project started from an interest in access and cross-disability solidarity. I was reflecting on my own artistic training being so visually focused, and thinking through, when am I working visually? Why am I working visually? I was wanting to be more proactive about making that work was accessible, especially in my online community spaces like social media. 

Bojana and I met through mutual friends. She was doing research around similar topics and we were able to come together. She is low vision and uses a screen reader, so she's been thinking about description and alt-text in a more long-term and daily way than me. But I think we both felt frustrated with a lot of the existing guidelines around alt-text, being very compliance-oriented, very perfunctory. And we were both thinking about access in general as creative, and as something that can be built into a project from the start. We ended up developing a workshop curriculum called Alt-Text As Poetry that introduces people to alt-text and consists of a series of writing exercises. We don't feel like we have the answers around how to write alt-text, or how to describe things, but we wanted to create space and time for people to practice and talk to each other about that process, and think through it together. 

That project has been going on since the end of 2018. We’re working on a website that acts as a hub for the project, and we made a workbook version of the workshop that’ll be released as a Google Doc, Word Doc, a PDF and an audiobook. 

LL: Yeah, I’m thinking about the alt-text in the exhibition. The way that the computer-generated alt-text was interpreting your work was really funny. Your approach is so often playful, and filled with whimsy and quirk. I wonder if you could talk about the role of humour in your practice?

SF: Yes, that’s a really big part of my practice. When I talk to a lot of people who are outside of any disability community, they treat disability with the utmost seriousness. That’s such a stark contrast to the way I live my life and the way I think a lot of disabled people live our lives. I’m trying to make work that feels consistent with the way that I move through the world and think about things. I think of humour as a kind of coping strategy. Like, that alt-text is so bad, you just have to laugh, you know? It can be cathartic to laugh at that together and be frustrated together and be angry together. 

LL: Definitely. I think that kind of brings us to the other idea I wanted to talk about in relation to your work, which is the notion of protest. Recently I was thinking about the centrality of the able body in the ways that many of us think about protest; the idea of being on the front lines of a rally or march, which is really demanding of a body. And in the work at CUAG, I’m thinking about the space you’re providing as almost a kind of sit-in space, but one that’s born out of the position of care and attention. You’ve also organized sit-in protest spaces through your project Anti-Stairs Club Lounge. I’m wondering if you could speak to how you’re considering and weighing these ideas of care and protest in your work?

SF: Johanna Hedva wrote an essay that really speaks to the connection between disability and sickness and protest. So often protest is conceptualized in very ableist terms, and I'm interested in what disability brings to protest and how we can form protest in ways that also include rest or care. 

I originally created Anti-Stairs Club Lounge for an inaccessible exhibition space called Wassaic Project. Wassaic Project is in a historic agricultural building and it's seven floors with no ramp or elevator access above the ground floor. I was thinking about how I might engage with that space and I decided to do this project called Anti-Stairs Club Lounge. It was a space on the ground floor of the building. It had seating and chilled seltzer and reading materials and some snacks. But the way that the lounge functioned was that it was behind a locked door, and in order to get access to the space, you had to sign in at the front desk saying that you wouldn't be going up the stairs to see the rest of the exhibition. So the lounge became a space exclusively for people who were staying on the ground floor. 

That was in 2017 and 2018, and then I found out about a structure that was being built in New York City called the Vessel. It’s this building-scale basket-like structure that's made of 154 interconnected stairwells–it's a structure made out of stairs. When I found out about that I felt really angry. We're so often told that things can't be accessible because there isn't a budget, or because it's existing historic architecture. The production budget for this project was $150 million dollars, and it's a new development. I wanted to respond to that and felt it made sense to bring Anti-Stairs Club Lounge to that space. To me, the best protest of the Vessel would be to demonstrate the ways that I and disabled people I know are interested in using public space–which is to hang out, to lounge, to rest, to gather, to be together. There were about 50 people who all came to this version of the lounge. 
There were some limitations specific to that location. The area around the Vessel is a privately-owned public space, so it's different than, say, a public park; you have fewer rights in a privately-owned public space. The owner of the space–which in this case is the development company that built the Vessel–has total say over what is allowed and not allowed there. And so a lot of the project also involved rethinking the lounge in ways that were like really hard to point to as things that we couldn't do. And also, in a way that could be collapsed quickly if we were asked to leave. So, for example, instead of building a structure to mark the area of the lounge, everyone who was in the lounge wore these bright orange beanies that helped delineate the space. I was worried that we wouldn't be allowed signage. So, I made these newspapers that had an article that a friend of mine, Kevin Gotkin, wrote about the Vessel that was printed inside, and the exterior of it said Anti-Stairs Club Lounge. So as someone was reading the newspaper, it functioned as signage.

LL: You’ve been advocating for a fundamental shift in the way we think about the structure of exhibition spaces. Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen a very public reckoning within the art world to address exclusionary practices within museums and galleries, which of course, many folks have been mobilizing for for a long time. This work has overwhelmingly been done by Black, Brown, Indigenous and people of colour, as well as women, queer, disabled and mad people. I wonder if, or how, the critiques of a gallery’s ableist architecture have been addressed or responded to by curators or gatekeepers of the spaces you’ve been exhibited in? Have you noticed any concrete changes in the way people who are exhibiting your work have restructured or redesigned their spaces?  

SF: Mostly, I have not seen a lasting impact and that's something that is complicated for me to navigate. I want to show my work in ways that are as accessible as possible–accessibility is built-in to my practice and in what I ask for from organizations or institutions. There's is often a dynamic between me and an institution where the responsibility towards access gets offloaded onto me or to other disabled artists, in ways that I think also happens for other marginalized artists and especially for multiply-marginalized disabled people. 

Hopefully in the future there will be more buy-in on the side of the institution and more knowledge and support, so that we can build creatively together. It’s been a mix, but it’s definitely on my mind: how do I make sure that I'm not taking on work that the institution needs to do?

LL: Exactly. You can’t do the work alone. I think that brings me to my last question. We’ve all been living through the global COVID-19 epidemic, and it is a pandemic that has not hit all people equally. And so, lastly, I’m curious about how you’ve been spending your time over the past couple of months. I know you were involved in a fund to help get money to chronically ill, disabled and immunocompromised people during this time. Can you tell us a little bit about that? And how else have you been filling this time?

SF: It's been really wild to see the access shift happen. This is definitely something I'm hearing from lots of people that I'm connected to. Just thinking about all of the times that we've asked for a live-streamed event, or asked to work from home, or asked to video chat into class and have been denied that. It's strange to see, suddenly, what's possible when non-disabled people need those accommodations. For me, being able to be home more is great for my access. It’s less time travelling to and from events and it's more time to sit and stretch. Being home more has been good for me, even though most things about what's happening have not been good at all, in terms of seeing the racist eugenics guiding the total disregard for the safety of disabled, elderly, and immunocompromised people. 

I've been working a little bit on projects here and there, but doing this work with Crip Fund has been really meaningful. It feels important to help get money out to people who need it. We fundraised and then gave out mostly $500 chunks of money to people who requested it. It’s similar to a lot of redistribution projects that are happening right now, and we've been lucky to be able to learn from other people's work–both in terms of conceptual questions and also nitty-gritty stuff around, like, what platform can we use to send the money and stuff like that. We went through a round of fundraising and distribution, and now we’re taking some time to pause and think about how we might want to carry the work forward.