M.  Lindsey Dolich Felt recommended Calling Up Justice bay Area Studio as a site to host M Elio’s Art Museum from Bed.  Claudia Alick had spoken on a panel with them at The Crip Tech Exhibition Panel in 2020. For all of 2024 M Elio is doing a project called Art Museum from Bed where local disabled, chronically ill, mentally ill, fat and neurodivergent folks host my art in their homes. The project is supported by the Wattis Foundation, Zellerbach Foundation, and Ruth’s Table. 

Claudia hosted the art from Feb 21-March 11. They agreed to call it “Em” when it was in their home. It was housed on a display table with wheels that could move form space to space. It had some time in the bedroom and the living room and primarily it was in the accessible studio.

• It was featured on Feb 22 in the background of an interview with academic scholars and researchers at Arizona State University on digital communications and social media platforms “Algorithmic Folk Theories”.
• On Feb 29 A presentation at La Mama Theater in New York projected onto a big screen for a live in person audience for a hybrid performance.
• On March 1 in Claudia’s Note Safe For Platforms Digital one person Show/ karaoke Birthday party.
• Shared with the entire Crip Create participants over 4 sessions.
• Shared March 2 in the background of the Virtual Protest. Shared in background of Trek Talk on Twitch and Tik-Tok.
• Shared during the Pandemic Solidarity for Life held in GatherTown March 9 at the Calling Up Justice Across Space and Time presentation.
• March 4 Shared with Elea Chang with Disabled and here in Portland Oregon in Portland the Bay Area Theater makers with Theater Bay Area Equity Diversity and Inclusion Workgroup.

About the Artist

M Eilo is an artist San Francisco, and the founder of BlinkPopShift, a nonprofit that uses art and technology to prove disability is a hot bed of innovation. Using a collage of physical and virtual materials they build prosthetics, archives, models, and portraits to experiment with disabled and autistic ways of knowing.

BlinkPopShift is best known for their computational prosthetics including Prosthetic Memory, a homemade AI built to offset the artists long term memory loss, Masking Machine, a wearable computer which automatically masks the artists face and simulates eye contact in social interactions, and Invisible Sculpture, an AR and performance piece used to show a monumental scale sculpture to museum visitors…uninvited.

Their work has been featured at DHMD Museum, BOZAR, Ars Electronica, SomArts, TED, the Exploratorium, SFMoMA (uninvited), the YBCA (uninvited), the Wattis Institute, XOXO, the Armory Show, the Seattle International Film Festival, the Smithsonian Institution and Kennedy Center…Calling Up Justice.

EMOTION MODELS ARTIST STATEMENT

As an Autistic person with alexithymia (emotion blindness) I wanted an alternative way to model and study feelings. Traditional tools like the emotion wheel, that encase lived experience in two dimensional planes and linguistic cul de sacs, do not map to my neurodivergent experience. But more than just creating a way for me to frame and communicate my experience of emotions this project also gives me a vehicle for investigating how others experience emotions.

For years I was tricked into the idea that real art is in art museums, real artists were the ones with galleries, selling big. Sometimes I still fall back into that mindset. But that hierarchy is yet another symptom of white supremacy, of patriarchy, of classism. Art Museum from Bed is a new/old way of exhibiting work and I believe it is vital not just to the future of my personal practice but also how to think about art objects’ role in society. 

They function as histories. Made in my home, hosted in yours, made by my hands, held in yours. They function as vessels. Made from the tailpipe of abundance, made from wasted time. They function as bodies. Made from gut punch and wet eyes, made from loud brain and heat.