boost: Two dyslexic people creating art about art and dyslexia

[jesse_the_k]

An Index of Natural and Artificial Reds [excerpt] by Christine Hume, Eastern Michigan University

Disability Studies Quarterly Vol 39, No 4 (2019)
https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6972/5472

Exquisite meditation by dyslexic writer on reading and memory: she’s assigns a rainbow of different red colors with the concept of "reading." Content note: description of child sexual assault not included in excerpt

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE
I have always loathed to read directions; I get anxious about sequentiality and the tiny print. Who follows directions to the letter anyway? The owners of things do. Fluent readers and affluent people. Please feel at liberty to read this aloud to your pet or a ghost; read it out of order or homophonically. Try to mentally turn each page a different red to mark it as "read." Color is indexical, both linguistically and visually. Red is the first color named in most languages therefore a primal way of shaping vision. Look for holes you can dive into, look for images you can use; move your eyes backwards or in concentric circles as you resist the text's chronology and linear logics; believe in its undulations; misread and daydream your way through. To this there is no conclusion, no summary, no resolution. You might read this sentence or just as well Johnnie Walker Red it.

[… snip …]

Geranium Lake
The red you sleep through, the red that only exists in dreams. If red were to fall asleep, it would mock human dishonesty. It would use up time and dream of its opposite. Red runs ahead and cannot wait for me. My body is a dream that mocks its own imagination. Reading is a dream of my body flying. My body is a dream that produces red by itself. Sentences streak by: book, book, pen. Vivid swaths of red ink on the page, so vibrant it seems to hum just above its own stain. If red were to wake after two hundred years, it would find itself the object of Tender Buttons. Red doesn't bifurcate into subject and object; no: the word runs where the world runs out: "Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question." To put reading in the past tense means to turn the page red.

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Described photos and interview with dyslexic and autistic UK artist Jon Adams

[one photo shows "The Emergency Alphabet" collage: A "break in case of fire box" contains a tight five-by-five grid of Scrabble tiles in alphabetical order, with the letter U down and outside the grid. A label underneath the box reads: ‘In case of imposed literacy only’]

From the interview with Emma Robdale in Disability Arts Online:

However, when first displaying ‘Emergency Alphabet’ he was relatively unknown, and described feeling like a ‘fly on the wall’, when listening to his own work being discussed, “Oh the ‘U’ is missing!… does he mean ‘you’, ‘me’, or, the ‘artist himself’?” From this initial eavesdropped feedback he adapted much of his later work; wanting it to be less direct. He realized that the ambiguity meant other people could “see themselves in it, and shrink-wrap a meaning of their own upon my work!” Desiring not to give definitive answers, but to make people question structures within society.

https://disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion/theres-an-emergency-alphabet-but-u-have-been-left-out-neurodivergent-artist-speaks-up/