Local Artist Brings Superheroes to Life For Saturday's Inaugural Capable Con
/New superheroes came to life as the biggest art project for local artist Mariah Yee as she designed all the characters for the inaugural Capable Con this Saturday.
Each character took approximately 40 hours to produce including their backstory and concept. Her mother, Leslie Yee is a CPD vice-chair and has vision loss. Leslie travels around with her guide dog, Akira. Photo by David Tuan Bui.
The free event is held by the Council for Persons with Disabilities (CPD) from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. outside the VentureNorth building. A play-on word of the popular event Comic-Con, Capable Con is designed to create open, healthy dialogues about disabilities and accessibility.
Yee created seven characters, each with their own disability and superpower. Each character set took roughly 40 hours of work with all works completed over the span of seven months.
“It was a great opportunity for me to potentially do something with my artwork and do something impactful here in Peterborough,” said Yee, CPD communications coordinator.
CPD volunteers helped create the concept and ideas of the superheroes before Yee made the illustrations for them.
“Some of them were accepted pretty quickly and some of them had to go through some adjustments and that’s just a part of the design process,” said Yee, CPD communications coordinator.
Each superhero is being featured at the event. The following are the characters showcased for Capable Con:
Scout and traveller, a hero with vision loss and his guide dog
Amanda Auriel, a hero with hearing loss but can read body signals and lips to capture words spoken. She uses a skateboard with her name spelled out in sign language.
Power Pals Jordan and Jamie who are on the autism spectrum. They possess the power of hyper-focus, unconventional outlooks, pattern recognition, great memory and recall.
Bionica Bot, an amputee gymnast with interchangeable parts for her arm to suit the task at hand.
An unnamed hero in a wheelchair.
