Christine Sun Kim. Degrees of Deaf Rage. 2018. Charcoal and oil pastel on paper.

Degrees of Deaf Rage tracks, through the drawing and subsequent editing, erasing, and smudging of monochromatic charcoal angle charts, varying degrees of rage felt in response to passive, ableist nonchalance toward Deafness in a range of unique scenarios (i.e: Degrees of My Deaf Rage in the Art World). Likening angle charts to universal expressions of sad and happy, the artist uses the directness of an infographic to chart her communications with people and institutions who don’t use ASL. There is a cutting angularity to Kim’s work: sharp, witty, cynical handwritten text bends in congruence with the slanting flatness of angle charts, filled in with a deep, exacting oil pastel black. Like vibrating musical notation, charcoal smudges leak out of the geometry, softly meeting words scratched out, revised, redacted. In symbiosis with the work’s direct political intent, there is an intuitive data-seeking present in Kim’s various drawings, transmitted through these measurements of the immeasurable.