Reader-in-Residence: Andi Gilker

STIM CINEMA (2024) embraces the stim as a form of care. In considering the tendency towards repetitive gestures, which are deeply comforting to neurodivergent folks, I’ve come to adore linocut printing as an expressive way to stim. I find the repetitive printing process akin to a self-soothing form of care, given how it foregrounds sensorial elements—specifically those pertaining to visuality and tactility. When I teach at the Art Gallery of Ontario, my courses often incorporate linocut as a bridge to mixed-media forms. Lino block printing is a practice that students often lose themselves in—be it in the designing, carving, or printing steps of the process. To read alongside the ethos of The Neurocultures Collective, we’ll spend lunchtime collaboratively carving and printing designs based on the installation while we find inspiration for our expressive stimming in the e|gallery.

Andi Gilker is a neurodivergent artist and academic working at the intersection of critical disability studies, sound studies, and visual media. Andi has a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University in Montréal, after which she completed a summer residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and lived and worked as an expressive portrait painter for many years. Currently, Andi is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, where her doctoral thesis focuses on the temporalities of dysfluency. Andi’s creative work spans categories. At the present moment, she is working on an experimental documentary on 16 mm about the devastating effects/affects of posthumous taxation on the bereaved.

Throughout Fall 2025 a lunchtime Reader-in-Residence series on UTM campus will offer group readings, discussions, and embodied activities led by guest contributors whose ethical, political, and social commitments complement the exhibition. Centring the practices of UofT faculty and graduate students, these sessions offer multimodal responses to neurodiverse cultures, aesthetics, and modes of perception.

Each session will be held in the exhibition’s Co-Creation Studio, located in the e|gallery, CCT Building lower level.

Snacks and refreshments will be provided.

Click here for a detailed campus map and here for directions to UTM.

The e|gallery is located on the ground floor of the CCT Building and is accessible to people who use mobility devices, with doorways measuring over 32” wide. All entrances at ground floor level are equipped with power-assisted doors. The e|gallery is accessible via the east entrance (adjacent to parking lot 9) at ground level, or by elevator from the main floor entrance and at parking garage levels 1, 3, and 5. Accessible multi-user gendered washrooms are located at ground level, and accessible multi-user all-gender washrooms are located on the third floor of the CCT Building.

STIM CINEMA is an exhibition and moving image installation that explores neurodivergent perception, agency, and communication in an era increasingly defined by misinformation, polarization, and systemic distrust.

Curated by Christine Shaw, the exhibition features work by The Neurocultures Collective (Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Sam Shown-Ahearn, Robin Elliot-Knowles, Lucy Walker), a group of neurodivergent artists in collaboration with artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood.

At its core, the project asks: What does it mean to trust one’s own perception when dominant narratives privilege certain ways of sensing, knowing, and being? How do neurodivergent experiences of movement, repetition, and sensory engagement challenge dystopian conditions of control, standardization, and hypersynchronization?

Comprised of tactile zoetropes, a three-screen film installation, and a studio featuring the collective’s collaborative process, STIM CINEMA critically intervenes in the dystopian conditions where difference is pathologized, sensory processing is disciplined, and trust in institutions is eroded. Instead of reinforcing logics of neurotypicality, this project explores other linguistic and embodied possibilities for being in relation—where trust is built through sensory connection, shared experience, and an ethics of care.

To learn more about STIM CINEMA and the contributors, visit the .

Host or Publisher Blackwood Gallery