Stephen Lapthisophon has always noticed the brown Plexiglas wheelchair lift on the stairs in the entryway to UIC’s Gallery 400. “It’s an awkward, dusty, overlooked structure that goes up three or four steps and is kind of stuck there,” he says. “It struck me that a lot of things that are made for the disabled are often an afterthought, and they end up not being integrated into the whole fabric of the building.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Lapthisophon, who’s 46 and teaches kindergarten, got his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 1977 and has exhibited his multimedia work widely over the last 25 years. In 1994 he lost part of his vision due to a degenerative neurological disease and is now legally blind. He reads using either a scanner that says the words aloud or a closed-circuit TV that can magnify print till it’s four inches high. When Gallery 400 invited him to make an installation for its current “At the Edge” series, he decided to examine “the kind of discomfort that is often encountered with adaptations for the disabled.” The installation’s title, With Reasonable Accommodation, is also a recurring phrase in the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. The act “basically says that employers or institutions have to use what is reasonable accommodation for those with disabilities,” explains Lapthisophon. “I’m laying it out there as this extremely vague provision for what needs to be done.”
The installation is, however, easily navigable for people in wheelchairs. “It’s not meant to be a lecturing, haranguing thing–like ‘This is the way the world should be,’” says Lapthisophon. “It’s more to cause people to be slightly uncomfortable, so if they encounter a discomfort in their life, instead of not knowing how to react they just say directly ‘This could be a better space’ or ‘I wonder what it would be like to not be able to climb those stairs.’”
