Blackwood Gallery exhibit explores neurodivergent communication
The latest exhibit from the Blackwood Gallery wants to challenge the notion of normativity.
STIM CINEMA, on view until Feb. 28, is a moving image installation that explores neurodivergent communication.
“Neurodiversity is not reducible to a person, it is a way, a modality that endangers the systemic hierarchy of all that neurotypicality values,” said Christine Shaw, director and curator of the gallery housed at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
The exhibit opened this month with a three-day conference titled Oughtism, supported by the 2025 UTM-Jackman Humanities Institute Annual Seminar program.
“Oughtism highlights practical and concrete attempts to reconfigure the world so that it might cultivate, rather than diminish, the flourishing of neurodivergent forms of life,” said Shaw, who is also an associate professor in UTM’s visual studies department.
“It presents the possibilities of a world informed by autistic perspectives and perception.”
In line with the gallery’s goal of providing space for transdisciplinary conversations informed by the many fields of study taking place on campus, the conference featured interdisciplinary talks on neurodiversity, disability, creative practice and collaborative methodologies.
Participants draw and craft during Co-creation as Stimming, a workshop by Neurocultures Collective, a group of five neurodiverse artists from the United Kingdom. (Photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)
Workshops included an exploration of autistic languaging and a “stimprovisation” jam exploring artmaking that provides sensory joy through practices of movement (stimdance), object (stimplements), and voice (sensinging).
The opening also included out-loud readings by neurodivergent poet Chris Martin on a tour of Spreads from the Multiverse, Blackwood’s exhibit on four lightboxes across campus.
The boxes feature pages from a literary series emerging from the “poetic practices of neurodivergent, autistic, neuroqueer, mad, nonspeaking and disabled cultures,” the gallery said. The outdoor exhibit will continue until April 28.
Shaw said she hopes the show prompts visitors to consider different ways of inhabiting the world.
“How do our closely-held biases block other ways of knowing?” she said.
Chris Martin reads to a crowd during Spreads from the Multiverse Tour, an out-loud reading tour of the Blackwood Gallery's lighboxes at the University of Toronto Mississauga. (Photo by Nick Iwanyshyn)
STIM CINEMA also features a screening of The Stimming Pool, co-created by artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood and the Neurocultures Collective, a group of five neurodiverse artists from the United Kingdom. The 18-minute film was the outcome of Autism Through Cinema, a five-year collaborative investigation into the relationships between neurodivergent thinking and cinematic creation.
“Stimming, or self-stimulation, is the practice of physical repetition as a way of taking sensory pleasure in recurrence, or of expressing and alleviating anxiety,” said Shaw. “The artwork reminds us that such stimulation is not only common to autistic experience but in the DNA of the moving image.”
Oughtism and STIM CINEMA continue the gallery’s 2025-26 exploration of neurodivergent doing, feeling and being, which also included artist Inari Sandell’s December exhibit Butterfly Logic, a look at the psychiatric and historic representations of autism.
Art centres and universities have a responsibility to spark conversations that foster new modes of accessibility, inclusivity and support, Shaw said.
“Oughtism asks: How do neurodivergent experiences of movement, repetition, and sensory engagement challenge neurotypical conditions of control, standardization and hypersynchronization?” she said.
“How can neurodivergence teach us to leap, dance, swerve and language our way toward elsewheres beyond the neurotypical?”
