November 10, 2025 - December 4, 2025

Borland Project Space

124 Borland Building, University Park, PA 16802

Public Zoom Tour Friday November 21, from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm EST.

“Access(ing) Intimacy: An Archive of Chronic Illness” examines the unwell body and the ways we care for ourselves when our unruly bodies do not fit within medical or social structures. It presents disability and access themes such as disclosure, the pressure to "perform" dis/ability, productivity, accommodations, and an embodied narrative about chronic illness through arts-based research. Lewis makes their experiences of illness visible after a history of not being believed, taken seriously, and blamed for their un/wellness, drawing on an archive of self-portraits documenting their chronic illness, which Lewis began recording in 2014 and continues in the present. This exhibition responds to the pressures on disabled bodies to conform to normative, capital-driven structures and how disabled people navigate suspicion around their conditions, causing them to perform for others as a form of self-care.

This exhibition draws it’s name from disability activist Mia Mingus, who explains “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs.” Access intimacy is “the kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level …  It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met …  Access intimacy is also the intimacy I feel with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives.  Together, we share a kind of access intimacy that is ground-level, with no need for explanations.  I don’t have to justify and we are able to start from a place of steel vulnerability. ” - Mingus, 2017