Built to Scale: Emily Barker puts Privilege and Ableism on Display at Murmurs
by Emily Claeys
In Built to Scale at Murmurs LA, artist Emily Barker (they/them) upends a world designed for the able-bodied. Barker’s first solo show since an accident left them disabled focuses on the world from their view — and from their wheelchair-bound height. Their new work demands a reexamination of privilege and ableism, posing the question: how do structures define and confine our experience? Who is othered by the way a space is designed?
The show immerses viewers on their feet into a forced perspective. A closet rod hangs well out of reach. A ghost-like, translucent replica of Barker’s kitchen is built to scale so that counters and upper cabinets are too high, giving those who are able to walk through the installation a visceral sense of the inaccessibility of quotidian designs. Through their work, Barker invokes our invisible reality: that nearly every single space, both public and private, has been made for normative bodies. In building spaces to accommodate only one type and status of body, we effectively define what a “normal” body or physical experience is and should be. Our architectural standards create the construct that any other type of body is “abnormal.”
Barker is laser-focused on the history and unseen politics of the manufactured world around us. Every countertop and sidewalk in America was at some point a decision made; how high, how wide, how level or not. Every wheelchair ramp, tool, billing system, and piece of home decor has been dreamed up and signed off on by able-bodied, privileged people in positions of power — and mostly men.
Barker’s work opens a window to an alternate world of unspoken experience. Familiar objects in shared spaces are revealed to be needlessly, excessively difficult to navigate for people using mobility devices. A rug placed on the gallery floor is some five inches thick, woven with plastic IV tubing and copper wire. Harsh materials expose a thoughtless underbelly of our most ingrained design choices — plush decor turned dangerous obstacle.
In a small, fluorescent-lit room, some 7,800 pages of paper sit in a tidy stack on the floor. This is a portion of Barker’s medical files and bills, detailing hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges. This inundation is matched only by the hundreds of hours spent navigating the healthcare system over the phone, on hold, waiting for answers and generating even more paperwork — statements and records, prescriptions and charts. The room is a bleak realization of Barker’s experience in the months and years following their accident. It will be immediately familiar to anyone who has spent time in the circle of bureaucratic hell required of those who have experienced any type of medical event. It links the experience of trauma and illness to a new kind of labor: the work of meeting your basic needs through the American healthcare system. The efforts of which can turn into a full-time job — one that you pay to perform, and not the other way around.
Pushed up against a wall near the front of the gallery is a ramp similar to one you would see over a set of stairs, meant to serve those with impairments or using mobility devices. These ramps are often the sole concession made by buildings in order to make them “accessible.” In Barker’s piece, the ramp travels up the wall at an extreme angle, insurmountable for even the most able of bodies. Beneath the ramp is a crumpled wheelchair, a tool of mobility and access made impotent in the shadow of this impossible mountain. For an able-bodied person who has never approached a slight incline and felt the weight of the task before them, it is an awakening — a generative experience of seeing the world with new empathy.
It’s also an experience everyone is bound to have in time. Built to Scale is a testimony and a warning — a reminder that every body is in a state of flux, that none of us will escape the changes of circumstance and time on our status of normativity. Chronic and invisible illnesses, becoming a parent, injury, the march of time — no one’s body will stay the same indefinitely. The show is a beautiful and personal plea to rethink the way we construct the world we share, and to reevaluate our notions of the normative body as a homogenous soldier in a stagnant state of ability.
Built to Scale runs until January 18, 2020 at Murmurs LA.
Emily Claeys is an arts writer living and working in Los Angeles. Find them here: @emily_claeys
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