Beyond Perception
June 18 – August 16, 2026
PROGRAM
Beyond Perception presents work by artists who practices are shaped by lived experiences with disability, including those that are visible, invisible, temporary, or ongoing. The exhibition focuses on how disability influences artistic process, material choices, and ways of engaging with audiences.
The artists included approach making through adaptation, translation, and experimentation. Their work reflects how physical, sensory, and medical realities can alter not only how art is produced, but how it is accessed and understood.
For Andrew Reach, the progression of a spine disease led to a shift from architecture to digital and sculptural practice. His current work combines 3D modeling, video, and printed forms, revisiting architectural thinking through new tools and methods that accommodate physical limitations.
Ceré Bellow works with natural dyes, plant materials, and mixed media to explore connections between the body, memory, and environment. Their process is rooted in material experimentation and reflects a shift toward art as a tool for healing.
Regina E. Dorfmeyer creates paintings through touch and intuition rather than sight. As her vision has declined, her process has become centered on physical contact with the surface, using her hands to build composition, texture, and color relationships.
Meg Matko is a visual artist, creative community builder, disability rights advocate and Community Development Specialist at the Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities. Matko’s work continually examines the role of the feminine body as narrator, interpreter, weight-bearer, and voice using sculpture, gestural action, and ego-shifting.
Kristi Copez, a seminary graduate, believes in Servant Leadership and is passionate about ministry, justice & racial equity as demonstrated through her belief in the power of art to heal. Copez says, “Since becoming sick and enduring many emotional and spiritual “deaths”, the spiral has become congruent with my willingness to continually go inward and emerge clearer and more intentional about advocating for marginalized BIWOC peoples, especially those of us who have had our personhood interrupted by the collective traumas and the resulting chronic & disabling evidence of the injustice of and to our bodies, and then retraumatized by being stifled by the very walls of (in)justice that would profit from our silence.”
These works show how disability can shape artistic practice in concrete ways. The exhibition highlights different approaches to access, perception, and making, and encourages viewers to consider multiple ways of experiencing and understanding art.
Thursday, June 18, 5-8 pm