AO ROBERTS
INTERVIEWS AND FEATURES:
Doucet, Hannah. "Abundance, Abundance, Abundance: Reparative Criticality in the Work of AO Roberts." Public Parking. 2024.
Sweatman, Conrad. "Not Just Fun and Games: Local Creator Programs Artistic Message." Winnipeg Free Press, Nov. 6, 2024.
Godfrey, Hannah. "Words in Whose Mouth: Incantation and Anti-Capitalism in the Work of AO Roberts." Critical Fictions, 2023.
Xiang, Joy. "10 Artists Transforming Material Practice." Canadian Art, Winter 2020.
Ballingal, Kendra. "The Stridents Review." C Magazine, September 2017.
AO Roberts (they/them) is a crip media conjuror and sonic interventionist who builds spaces resonating the unruly poetics of Disabled life. Based in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg), their work unfolds across sculptural installation, experimental sound, and digital ecosystems.
Roberts' collaborative installations explore the intersections of labour, language, technology, and control, creating spaces where sound traces thresholds for new possibilities. This approach is evident in works like SICKROOM, which transforms the fragile amulets and architectures of healing. 2019’s Crisis Canon flooded an abandoned concrete site with the reverberations of collective lament performed by Sarah Jo Kirsch, Doreen Girard, Zohreh Gervais, and Bret Parenteau.
Their 2024 release Plants Properties Equipment (PPE), an interactive world developed with Séance Collective, invites players into a sentient landscape that dwell in the generative fractures of crip time. PPE featuring an original soundtrack with contributions from Johanna Hedva, Molly Joyce, Andy Slater, Chisato Minamimura, and Medical Museum.
Roberts’ work has been recognized through a 2022 MacDowell Fellowship, inclusion on the 2021 Sobey Art Award Longlist, and residencies at Dreamsong Gallery, Oolite Arts, and Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation. Under the alias VOR, they compose and perform experimental electronics, including their 2022 full-length release Ruminant (Makade Star). In Fall 2025, they begin a PhD in Communications and Culture at York/Toronto Metropolitan University, where they will deepen their study of crip sonic futurism.