Meet the Artist

Hollis

McConkey

Interdisciplinary

“I ask now, how can I represent my chronically ill future as a desirable one? Through the lenses of crip time and my experience as a disabled/chronically ill woman, I invite my viewers to consider a world where temporalities are multiplicitous and simultaneous. Each element of my work represents a glimpse of myself in a moment of time, never gone and always changing and negotiating the space around one another. Together, references to my past and present create possibilities of crip futures endlessly and all at once. Image description: A still of Hollis' performance/video work, called "Encore!". Hollis is standing with her back facing the camera wearing a black tank top and a black glove on her left hand. She is hitting various shades of pink paint onto a large canvas on the wall while an old video of her in a swim race is projected overtop. ”

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Hollis McConkey (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, Ontario, on the territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Haudenosaunee, the Anishinaabe, and the Huron-Wendat. As a chronically ill woman, artist, and previous athlete, Hollis' work aims to make visible nuanced invisibilities of her own identity and experience in Western ‘normative’ structures. Taking references from contemporary media, sports, and historical art practices, her work considers what it means to be an invisibly disabled woman navigating structures designed to marginalize experiences outside of heteronormative, eurocentric, capitalist, ableist, and patriarchal systems. Growing up in competitive athletic spaces brought forward questions about female belonging and identity construction in order to fit into patriarchal structures, and began Hollis’ contemplation about perception; the concept of seeing and being seen are the central focus of her practice.
Goldsmiths College, University of London
MA Contemporary Art Theory
Major In progress
OCAD U - Faculty of Art
Drawing and Painting
Major Completed, 2023
OCAD U - Faculty of Arts & Science
Art History
Minor Completed, 2023

Disability Theory Installation Drawing and Painting Video Art History Performance

2023, Now I Can See What's Not There
EMS Gallery, Toronto, ON
2023, GradEx
OCAD University, Toronto, ON
2023, Archiving Nostalgia
OCAD University, Toronto, ON
2022, Making Gender
Online/Remote
2021, The Language of Abstraction
Online/Remote
2018, Showcase 18
Robert Bateman High School, Burlington, ON
2018, State of the Art
New Street Education Centre, Burlington, ON
2017, Paint the Town
Burlington City Hall, Burlington, ON
2017, Halton Secondary Art Show
New Street Education Centre, Burlington, ON
2017, Graduate Art Show
Robert Bateman High School, Burlington, ON
2021, Joseph Muscat Scholarship
OCAD University
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