Image Description: A not-bad-looking white man, with short dark hair and a trimmed beard, wears a black button-up shirt and is photographed against a dark background. He faces slightly to the right, not smiling, with a calm, neutral expression.
Atanas Bozdarov is an artist and designer whose work incorporates sculpture, photography, and graphic design to explore systems of access, intersections of disability and design, and architectural propositions for public space. Bozdarov’s work has been exhibited internationally, including in Resistance and Respiration, curated by Amanda Cachia at Contemporary Calgary. His recent projects include creating a garden and library at Tangled Art + Disability for the Mayworks Festival (2024); participating in QUIET PARADE at The Blackwood Gallery (2024); collaborating with A.S.M. Kobayashi on Rise Over Run (2024) at Nuit Blanche—a project exploring connections between disability and skateboarding communities; and exhibiting a new series of photographs in Proof 31 at Gallery 44 (2025). He holds an MDes from OCAD University.
My practice is grounded in my lived experience with a physical disability and began with an investigation of the built environment to examine access. I’m particularly interested in how even the simplest accessibility interventions—such as a ramp—shape how people move through public space. These structures are not only functional but also symbolic, revealing systems of power embedded in how space is designed, controlled, and experienced.
Like the small, brightly painted ramps distributed by Toronto’s StopGap Foundation, which promotes barrier-free spaces by providing portable access ramps to businesses, my project Sand Ramps reflects the conditional nature of accessibility. For this series, I built temporary ramps from sand along the shoreline each day. Over time, they would erode under rising lake water and disappear without a trace. This performative gesture underscores the persistence and repetitive labour required to maintain access, echoing the ongoing effort of placing and removing StopGap ramps. The work becomes a metaphor for the fragility of accessible design, often treated as temporary rather than permanent.
By presenting these ramps as large-scale photographs, I reposition them as objects worth noticing. At the same time, the work draws attention to their absence and the moments when access is denied. These projects operate as both documentation and provocation, asking how something as simple as a flat surface propped at an angle can point to broader, less visible structures of power.
Sand Ramp #1
This photograph depicts a beach scene on a bright, sunny day. The pebble-strewn beach fills our lower left half of the image, with white-capped waves rolling in from our right. The horizon is visible in the distance, near the top of the image, marked in part by a long, straight pier or jetty jutting out into the water from our left. Near the shoreline, at the centre of the photograph, is a ramp made of packed sand, rising toward the water. The top and sides of the ramp appear perfectly flat, and the edges are clean and ruler-straight. The photo, which is a companion piece to Sand Ramp #2, contrasts the hard, angular structure of the ramp against the organic environment of sand and sea.
Sand Ramp #2
This photograph depicts a beach scene near sunrise or sunset, suggested by the soft, warm light in the sky, which appears in hues of pale orange and pink. The pebble-strewn beach fills the lower left half of the image, with white-capped waves rolling in from our right. The horizon is visible in the distance, near the top of the image, marked in part by a long, straight pier or jetty jutting out into the water from our left. Near the shoreline, at the centre of the photograph, a driftwood log rolls in the surf beside a lump of wet sand. The photo, which is a companion piece to Sand Ramp #1, captures distinct textures; the roughness of the driftwood, the wetness and granularity of the sand, the smooth pebbles scattered across the beach, and the movement of the waves.