Hannah Doucet | A Wish Stays With You

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Hannah Doucet, "Still from Watch in Awe," 2021

video, 3 minutes 24 second

OPENING RECEPTION: 16 September at 7 PM

When I was ten, I wished to visit Disney World.

Each year at least 13,000 critically ill children make this same wish. I made my wish after two years of treatment for Lymphoblastic Lymphoma. In Canada and the U.S., half of all eligible children wish to visit Disney World. In response to the ongoing popularity of the Disney wish, Give Kids the World Village (GKTWV), a non-profit resort that accommodates critically ill children and their families on their trip to visit Disney World, opened in 1986.

A Wish Stays With You satirizes, reflects on, and theorizes around aesthetic seduction at Disney and GKTWV. Within the exhibition my use of the mediums of photography, video and sculpture grapples with the aesthetics of branding and marketing alongside built (and crumbling) fantasy spaces and research aesthetics borrowed from my studio wall. These visual languages of presentation (seduction) and research (critical engagement) form the basis of the exhibition.

The exhibition weaves together explorations of memory, capitalist constructions of fantasy, corporate philanthropy, problematizing the histories of wish-granting charities, advertising, performance, death, illness, disability, ableism within fairy tales, and toxic positivity. Through an autotheoretical lens A Wish Stays With You represents a ‘pulling back of the curtain’ on the long-standing relationship between charitable organizations devoted to fulfilling critically-ill children’s wishes and Disney, the corporate media giant that spins tales of realized dreams.

ARTIST TALK: 16 September at 6 PM