Platforms 2020: Public Works is a monthly series of temporary public art projects that presented from June 2020 until the end of December 2020.

These artworks were selected through an open call inviting Vancouver-based artists to share projects that they have been working on that respond to the circumstances of living during a pandemic and critical time of change.

The public art program was launched on transit shelters, billboards, and video screens throughout the city.

Disability Pride Plaques (Liquid, Earth, Air, Fire) presented on twenty transit shelter posters throughout the city from August 3 to September 6, 2020, with a special focus on the artist’s Downtown Eastside community. 

Sharona Franklins’ works are assemblages created from ani­mal derived gelatin, medicinal plants, foraged wildflowers, and machine made metal hardware. Psychedelic wooden plaques are accompanied by prose destigmatizing and celebrating dis­abled lives. Medallions and commemorative religious plaques, typically hung on the walls of peoples’ homes are often accom­panied by proverbs speaking to hegemonic conceptions of the divine and the exceptional. Disability Pride Plaques transform these preconceptions, resituating the domestic into the public sphere.