Cassandra Jasulevicz
Anna Berry: Bringing the Outsiders In
My research focuses on Anna Berry’s art practice, her role as a disability rights activist, and how her work inspired by her own neurological developmental disability intertwines with the history of the disability arts and disability rights movements. Tentatively named 'Anna Berry: Bringing The Outsiders In', my research project concentrates on analyzing Anna Berry’s extensive portfolio of sensory installations, collection of disability-focused essays and speeches, and her detailed curatorial framework behind her show 'Art and Social Change: The Disability Arts Movement' at Midlands Art Centre in order to understand the greater scope of the Disability Arts and corresponding Disability Rights Movements. Aside from creating works that retaliate against the misconceptions of disability, she is also an impassioned advocate for championing disabled and outsider artists in the institutional spaces they are traditionally excluded from.
Anna Berry, Breathing Room, Paper, carbon fiber, plastic, steel, chain and gears, Via annaberry.co.ukBreathing Room is an immersive installation primarily composed of mechanized paper cones that mimic the movement of rhythmic breathing. One of her best known works, Breathing Room is a work that focuses on ideas of sensory aesthetic and neurodivergent experience through its distinct immersive nature and juxtaposition of harrowing external mechanized skeleton with soft, luminous, organically moving interior.
Anna Berry, The Constantly Moving Happiness Machine, Neoliberal texts, carbon fiber, plastic, steel, chain and gears, wood, Via annaberry.co.ukThe Constantly Moving Happiness Machine is a participatory installation composed of large paper snowflakes. The snowflakes become activated by the viewer cranking a handle to make the snowflakes fly around the room hypnotically. The Constantly Moving Happiness Machine is a piece about the individual’s roles in and relationship to consumer capitalism. Mainstream oppression of disabled individuals is rooted in capitalist relations of production. Capitalist economies reject disabled individuals as being unproductive, resulting in the institutional reinforcement of negative ideas concerning disability.
Anna Berry, Dole Scum II, DWP benefits papers, eggshells, ply, plastic, glue, Via annaberry.co.ukDole Scum II is composed of a mass of broken eggshells, topped with small origami boats made of DWP benefit papers sailing across the surface of the shells. Dole Scum II aims to capture the instability and stress of living on benefits (disability benefits and otherwise).
Cassandra Jasulevicz
(she/her)
Art History & Glass ‘22
Instagram: @cassi_jasi
Cassandra Jasulevicz is an emerging Philadelphia-based sculptor, currently a Senior BFA in Glass and BA in Art History from Tyler School of Art & Architecture in Philadelphia, PA. Her work and research focuses primarily in disability arts and sensory experience as it relates to mental illness. Works of hers have been previously exhibited at the NextGen 7.0 group exhibition at VisArts Center in Rockville, MD, Pier Review group exhibition at Cherry Street Pier, and will be exhibiting her solo thesis exhibition Spectra at the Stella Elkins Gallery in the coming weeks.