Site Specific Installation

The purpose of this project was to create an installation art piece that pertained to a specific location on the SUNY Fredonia campus. Ever since my freshman year at Fredonia, I have found it strange that the location for the Student Disability Support Services Office is on the fourth floor of the library. This is why I wanted to create an installation in the hallway leading to the Office of Disability Support Services (DSS). This oversight of putting a resource for disabled students on the top floor of the library seemed incredibly inconvenient in my eyes.

As a student who has reached out to the office of DSS in previous semesters, I wanted to poll other students about their experiences with the office. Most of the information I gathered from my fellow students is not negatively pointed to the office of DSS itself, but rather the University’s accessibility in general. Similarly, I realize that the choice to have the office of DSS on the fourth floor of the library was not made by the office of DSS, but by the University. I wanted to illustrate how even when the University strives to be accessible to students with disabilities, the inconveniences are still ever-present.

My vision for the installation was to replicate a portion of Fredonia’s campus onto a tabletop wooden maze. The objective for the viewer is to maneuver a miniature wheelchair around the maze using only one finger. The difficulty to move the wheelchair in the path that the viewer wants is supposed to represent the frustration that some disabled students experience while trying to travel between classes. I built the buildings of the campus out of wood blocks and painted them to differentiate between the different buildings on campus. I also created a poster to accompany the maze with a key to identify the buildings and encourage the viewer to “navigate your campus.”