Nat Decker’s exhibition, “Bad Topology”, explores the intersection of topology, disability, and the digital age. Topology, a mathematical field studying the properties of shapes under deformation, parallels the treatment of disabled bodies, often viewed as “bad topology” that requires fixing. Through sculptural works like “Body Topology (2024)” and the video “Bad Topology (2024)”, Decker challenges this notion, proposing that disability can be a space for exploration and adaptation rather than a problem to solve. The exhibition employs multimedia works, such as “Point to Point Topology (2024)”, to visualize digital network structures, illustrating how the internet enables connections for disabled individuals facing accessibility barriers.
Decker critiques physical spaces, exemplified by the inaccessible Ceradon Gallery, while also advocating for future accessibility improvements. The exhibition employs “topological puzzles” to symbolize the challenges faced by disabled individuals in navigating social and institutional environments. Decker, a Los Angeles-based artist, integrates technology and accessibility into their practice, reflecting on the complexities of the disabled experience. **Bad Topology** serves as both an artistic statement and a platform for broader discussions on how art spaces can evolve to become more inclusive and responsive to diverse needs.
Ceradon is LA’s first trans-established gallery. Founded by Andra Nadirshah & Stevie Soares in 2024. Ceradon specializes in cultivating the work of nexus artists including but not limited to the craft of DJs, economists, sculptors, writers, architects, designers, and painters. We are keenly interested in developing the practices of artists working across mediums, economies, and worlds. As trans people are made to seek radical honesty with their own identities, we believe we, as gallerists, are uniquely able to recognize radical honesty in the work of artists. Ceradon consists of our two co-directors and a board of advisors composed of local & international community leaders.
Nat Decker: Bad Topology / Ceradon Gallery, Los Angeles. Opening reception, October 11, 2024.
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Nat Decker presents Bad Topology, an exhibition using the field of topology as a lens to analyze disability and the adaptability of the body in an increasingly digitized era. Topology is a branch of mathematics that studies the conserved properties of shapes and objects as they undergo deformations, stretching, compression, and reworking. Topology has been fundamental to 3D animation and modeling, where distinctions between “good” topology and “bad” topology are made to separate computer-generated surfaces that can move and change fluidly from those that glitch, rip, and produce what is considered “undesirable” movement the animator must solve.
Here, through sculptural works such as Body Topology (2024) and their video work Bad Topology (2024), Decker explores how the disabled body and mind have similarly been treated as something to be “solved”, as “bad topology” in need of being remedied. Refuting this, Decker opens new ground to reinterpret disability as a liberated space of body exploration, tinkering, and adaptation of perception. Indeed, How can we apply the logic of topology – that fundamental properties of an object are preserved through stretching, twisting, and bending – to our understanding of humanity? The marginalized body should not be denied humanity; the othered, disabled, racialized, oppressed body is not a distortion, bending, or stretching of the normative, but an expression of the expansive diversity which is fundamentally human.
Topology’s significance has become evident in our understanding of digital networks, which form the foundation of the Internet. Our exploration of different systems and methods of connecting nodes has paved the way for our current dominant forms of digital communication. Visual representations of these modes of connection are depicted in multimedia wall-mounted works such as Point to Point Topology (2024), Ring Topology (2024), and Star Topology (2024), each representing a specific schematic of network infrastructure. Attached to these works are “topological puzzles”–mechanical puzzles that can be solved by disentangling their pieces, gesturing towards the invasive scrutiny and unsolicited curative assertions the disabled individual encountered both in the rhythms of social interaction and the involvements of medical and government institutions who mediate access to care or support.
Transforming abstract network types into steel, epoxy, and aerosol paint works signifies the delicate intersection between the physical and digital for disabled individuals. Digitization and the internet have enabled disabled people to access vital community and simulate the physical spaces that present accessibility barriers. Ceradon, with its staircased entrance, represents such inaccessibilities. Rather than disregarding this feature, Bad Topology serves as both a critique and proposal for the space. This exhibition can be accessed by those unable to climb stairs or attend public gatherings, or those who are located far away, through networked live-streaming on the internet.
Although Ceradon Gallery is presently an inaccessible space, it can be stretched, twisted, and bent, into a more accessible one. In this vain, Ceradon has committed to moving to a wheelchair-accessible space in the next 1 and a half years. Bad Topology aims to be an exhibition and a platform for broader discussions with art spaces in Los Angeles on how they too can potentially transform into more accessible, digitized spaces.
Nat Decker (b. Chicago) is a Los Angeles-based artist interrogating the politicality of the alienated body/mind networked within a call for collective care and liberation. Working critically with technology, they identify the computer as an assistive tool affording a more accessible and capacious practice. They reflect on the virtual as a space of potential requiring contestation for the ways it mirrors patterns of exploitation and exclusion. Their practice fundamentally integrates accessibility, collectivism, and friction as generative mediums.
Working with computational and sculptural processes, they trace serpentine connections between the body and modes of technology. They render the mobility device/disabled body as cultural expansion and agitation of conventional desirability politics, as formal object laden with stigma while freedom-giving, sterile and metallic while sensual and soft, (un)aestheticized while interacting with designations of usefulness, function, and capitalistic innovation.
Nat is a 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow with their collective Cripping_CG, and was a Y10 member of NEW INC and 2023 Processing Foundation Fellow. They are also a community organizer and access worker. In June 2022, they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design|Media Arts and Disability Studies.
