Connection Collective are a new found Emerging Artist Collective, run by recent East Midlands Fine Art Graduates. With a recent 6- Month Residency at BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham.
Graphic poster design illustrated and digitally manipulated by Olivia Azzopardi
COLLABORATIONS and EXHIBITION AT FISHER GATE POINT STUDIOS
Video Tour of Connection Collective's Inaugural Exhibition. Photographed by Katie Rayson, Video Edited by Olivia Azzopardi.
Basketcases
T’yka Xavier, Olivia Azzopardi and Sophie Lynn-Carney
Video performance
Duration approx. 10 minutes
2023
'Basketcases' sees each member of the collaboration taking on an exaggerated alter-ego with a fruit namesake in mind (grape, pineapple, and cherry), clad in drag makeup, freeing themselves from their normal behaviour, finding ever increasingly weird ways to eat fruit, and the aftermath. Full of pop-culture references, zoom-ins and silly captions, this is a homage to the queer, YouTube-style-humour the three artists grew up with and bonded over watching during the Age of the Internet of the late 00s and 2010s. The weirdness of the piece is very deliberate – this piece being the product of three ‘fruity’ artists connecting through humour, delirium and the idea of feeling free in a safe space. As queerness is often framed as being ‘alternative’ or ‘out of the norm’ by heterosexual people, the three artists exaggerate this, parodying the homophobic ideas.
The connection created through taking on these alter-egos is then the main focus, ‘Basketcases’ being a piece showing the connection of the LGBTQ+ community, works as part of the wider goal of connection that Connection Collective strives for.
Two Voices, Two Worlds
Zoe Milner and Olivia Azzopardi
Cardboard, acrylic paint, and paint pens
Dimensions variable
2023
The artists Olivia (Livvy) Azzopardi (partially deaf) and Zoe Milner (profoundly deaf) created Two Voices, Two Worlds demonstrating their personal experiences as being queer and gender non-conforming artists who have hearing loss, and profoundly deaf identities. Their project is inspired by protest signs, in particular the ‘BSL Act Now’ campaign, which Milner attended themselves. Their protest signs use recycled cardboards with posca pens, inspired by the protest signs they saw there. These cardboard pieces contain the mixture of emotional language barriers and behaviours they perceived throughout their childhood journey – such as disability discrimination, communication barriers, and deaf culture related activism. Azzopardi’s font style is based on the Calibri/ times new roman font, which is a commonly used, institutional used, formal font. She uses this to demonstrate their feelings of being constrained by an ableist society, and feeling stuck with not being fully proud and isolated from her deafness as a partially hearing person.
Whereas Zoe’s font is colourful and bold, in order to educate the audience about their identity as a person with an invisible disability, and being proud of living outside of the expectations of a person who is hard of hearing, achieving much success. Both juxtapose each other’s experiences of deafness in society, showing two sides of the deaf community.