Barbara Bickel | Oracular Co-Encounters | Thursday July 21, 7-9pm
The STAG is honored to host Barbara Bickel, a visiting artist and educator from Illinois who has a long history in Vancouver and Calgary. She will be presenting the results of her residency - Oracular Co-Encounters - with an event at the STAG
Thursday, July 21, 7-9pm (with a brief Artist Talk at 7:30).
Additional visits to the gallery may be arranged from July21-24 by emailing the STAG at diademdiscos a/t gmail d/o/t com. Other public events, including an additional artist talk with the Gestare Arts Collective will be announced soon.
Read more about the work in Barbara’s own words below…
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The STAG residency with its mandate of freeing art is an opportunity to complete an installation of spontaneous artworkings that respond to the commercialized phallic driven world of contemporary art. With intense physical gestures I draw and move within the trauma of the art world’s edges, tracing and retracing the rectangular form of the mail-in subscription card found within the art magazine.
Densely drawn lines of black and blue, red, pink, green, purple and yellow oil pastel colours mask the return postage emblem and blanket the publisher’s address. Its intended transport and return, with the promise of payment for future connection to the art world, is interrupted and rerouted back to its matrixial origins—the sacred act itself of making art. Rendered unreadable in the English language of business, an oracular voice emerges in response to the artworkings. Non-verbal acoustic sounds emerge from my throat, my belly, as a layer of sound is drawn onto the image, offering com-passionate counsel to those willing to listen to the submerged voice of knowing and unknowing from the matrixial sphere (to listen to the layered sound drawings of art oracles go to http://www.gestareartcollective.com/barbara-bickel.php)
The art and writing of artist, psychoanalyst and theorist Bracha L. Ettinger (2004), who has developed a theory based in matrixial borderspaces, offers an aesthetic and ethical feminine-based embodied and relational language to articulate what has been suppressed and lost within the phallic sphere.
To be an artist operating in the matrixial sphere is a fragile endeavor where “the future traumatically meets the past… and the outside meets inside (p. 77).” As I draw and sound my way through/with/beyond/behind this series, I engage what Ettinger calls metramorphosis:
a process of inter-psychic communication and transformation that transgresses borders of the individual subject and takes place between several entities. It is a joint awakening of unthoughtful-knowledge on the borderline, as well as an inscription of the encounter in traces that open a space in and along the borderline itself.
As I encounter the momentarily opened spaces of the borderlines that separate me from communication with others in the phallic sphere of the art world I reach out in these artworkings with radical trust toward other.
From the borders and edges of the phallic sphere of the contemporary art world oracular movements, images and sounds from the matrixial sphere continue to lead us into/through/beside/behind the trauma of erasure and separation, returning us to precious aesthetic and ethical moments of interconnectivity, and jointness in difference.
It is my desire that the visual art conjoined with the oracular sound experiences be encountered and engaged by others while at the STAG. While in process Celeste Snowber and Lynn Fels are bringing their graduate students from her Simon Fraser University Arts Based Inquiry course for an interactive visit. I am looking forward to what I know they will add to my own inquiry process. The end of my residency will include a closing public reception on Thursday July 21, 7-9pm.
Barbara Bickel, July 13, 2011
Ettinger, Bracha L. (2004). Weaving a woman artist with-in the matrixial encounter-event. Theory, Culture and Society, 21(1), 69-93.
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Barbara Bickel is a visual and performing artist, researcher, and educator. An Assistant Professor in Art Education and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA she teaches art as an inquiry and meaning making process. Her arts-based Ph.D. in Art Education from The University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada was awarded the Arts Based Educational Research Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association (ABER SIG) in 2009. Her research interests include arts-based inquiry methods, matrixial theory, collaboration, community-based art, the body voice, relational aesthetics, experimental video art, spirituality, feminism, women’s leadership, restorative and transformative learning and performance ritual. Her art and performance rituals have been exhibited and performed in Canada and the US since 1991. She co-founded The Centre Gallery (1995-2001), a non-profit women’s focused gallery in Calgary, Alberta. She is a co-founder and member of the Gestare Art Collective, Her articles on arts-based inquiry and a/r/tography have been published in numerous journals and book chapters. To view her art portfolio and arts-based research on-line visit http://www.barbarabickel.com
The Gestare Art Collective was officially formed in 2009 by co-founders Barbara Bickel, Medwyn McConachy, Nané Ariadne Jordan and Wende Bartley. Their collaborative beginnings began in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 2007 through sharing their art and spiritual life practices with each other. Entering creative and ritual space at artist residencies at Artscape Gibraltar Point led to the formation of the collective.
Their artworkings are visual, textural, vocal, performative, moving, ephemeral, earth-related and time/space based. The source of their artistic collaborations comes from a mutual engagement with the Divine Feminine and the Earth, gestated in the labyrinthine container of wombspace Living in different geographic locations in North America they share individual and collective art practices and develop collaborative projects through digital on-line communication at a distance and at residencies. Visit http://www.gestareartcollective.com
Gestare is Latin for the verb “to carry” in the womb. As women committed to living as process artists in relationship with each other, the earth, cosmos and all its inhabitants, we honour and practice gestation as a form of inquiry and pedagogy.
