The inarticulate wants sanctuary more than it wants words, words arrive last, not first. This a/r/tographic exhibition is a doubling, tripling, an unintentional echoing of voice, text, and image. Fisher’s art maintains the chord base tone in the installation through a complexifying of relations, of tone and chord changes, using them as fundamental binary of circle and square (method and thinking). Bickel’s art holds the percussive theme and octaval setting (body as battleground for re-imagining, battle with words and paper), dealing with the positionality of the artist within the academy as an active intervention (arational inquiry, body). Peterson’s art plays off these two fundamental modalities, and is an example of the kind of melodies you can create... lament, durge, lyrics, arias (effects of representation), as an artist/researcher/educator engaged in sacred space/experience as pedagogy.

Barbara Bickel, PhD Candidate

... I wonder how to sustain a relationship between us, between two made from body and language, between two intentions participating in an incarnate relationship which is actualized by flesh and words. In this double willing I and you remain always both active and passive, perceiving and experiencing, awake and welcoming. In us, sensible nature and the spirit become in-stance within the singularity and evolution through the risk of an exchange with who is irreducible to oneself.

As an artist in the midst of a Ph.D. program in Education, I am appreciative of the sanctuary space of the gallery. Creating and transforming spaces into locations of ritual experience is my pedagogy.
The video installation includes a 13 minute documented performance ritual that I performed in a classroom setting, entitled Living Inquiry, alongside a 4 minute video projected onto the ground, entitled “The other woman that she will be.” The video is echoed in the still images of the triptychs done with Fisher and Peterson.
The premise of my art practice has been that humans have evolved into a place of being in exile from their own bodies, and in that, exiled from a body-based knowledge. I have long struggled for an articulate voice sourced from body-based knowledge as a female and an artist in this world. I have been dedicated to visually reading, writing, and ultimately embodying a female sentence. The intention behind the art I create has been to locate female narratives that read body symbols and illuminate the body as a sacred source of text and knowing. As well, I have been interested in the body as a battleground, and a site for re-imagining what it means to be a woman. My deepening challenge has been to confront the traditional sentence structure that has held the feminine and female body in exile from itself, rendering her silent.
I recently wrote a book chapter, entitled Embodying Exile: Performing the “Curricular” Body for the book, entitled Curriculum and the Cultural Body edited by Stephanie Springgay and Debra Freedman, which is based on this documented performance ritual and currently in press. A draft copy of the chapter is available to read in the gallery.

Jennifer Peterson PhD Candidate

It is an honor to be invited to participate with R. Michael Fisher and Barbara Bickel in co-constructing this installation.
For some time now we have been conversing about several different things that have come together in this work, which assembles around many shared interests. This includes my thesis work on inarticulate spaces. I am interested in what Julia Kristeva terms “a semiotic that does not necessarily coincide with linguistic communication.” The moments and movements of a non language, which locate in the human space of being and form are dense important locations. These not-always-explicable places which often “exist without repeated legitimation” may nevertheless form spots essential to individual and collective human dignity, vitality and generativity. Against the spaces it is easy to commit a catachresis, “an improper use of words.”
Traces of an important positionality around the inarticulate linger in Barbara Bickel and Michael Fisher’s work. They construct their images around a potent space by playing with the bounding dynamics of the grounding square and the centralizing moment of the circle. This conversation is simple—yet creates its time-filled moments. To me their work features a kind of grounding relation, as practice.
I experience a loss of gravity and ground as I navigate the digital, the medium through which I experience a kind of brimming presence/absence. Thus I play with marking my work with the small green glass stones in an effort to give them some of this grounding and gravity. I add them to my images, as my means of marking my positioning, my body in reference to them. I attempt a tracking with the stones of a boundary between me, two dimensional virtuality and three dimensional actual/virtual space—and the stones also reference back to the gatherings of light and density in Michael’s and Barbara’s work. As I bend to place these stones—as a bit of weighted space—in/on my images, I allow this weight to rest in my warm palm. These stones speak to me of intention, of a practice—as does Michael’s and Barbara’s work. They are practicing artists, educators and researchers.
I am an educator/researcher/thinker who has recently stumbling into art and performing. I research the digital which has a tremendously reflective and refractive nature. In making art and performing inquiry into the relations between making, thinking (and gravity)—I have come to practice a pose/counter pose positioning regards the digital. My images are conversations between digits (actual—as in fingers, feet and body) and digits (virtual). I make images that I then interpret with my digital camera/scanner/software—printing these out, then adding a new layer of making onto these images and so forth. My research has involved attempting to track what happens in these conversations between body, positioned in certain relations of meaning to its makings.
I have been surprised to discover that this means of working has been tremendously vitalizing. The green glass stone straddles an important boundary between virtuality and actuality—as does Barbie—whose doll qualities allow her to bear a kind of agency, kindling up some inarticulate space between technology and person. My art is the result of my research in which I attempt to practice the digital with a kind of intentionality, a weighted-ness that is a counter pose to the spinning nature of relations to the screen.

R. Michael Fisher, Ph.D.

I have found at least three readings have emerged in this art series, each difficult to articulate, thus the In-Art-Iculate Ground worked for me as a collaborative title for this exhibition.
I will talk about two of the readings in the Artist Talks scheduled during this exhibition. Here I will focus on the third one, which could be categorized as the more “political” of the three. This third reading begins with the materials I’ve used to do art work upon—that is the “ground” on which I begin the physical working. They are all materials that have been recycled, of sorts. Other than the canvas pieces, the others are recycled pieces from two other art series I have done and exhibited in the past six years. The canvas pieces (except one) were throw aways from another artist who had decided to not paint anymore.
It occurs to me that all these art pieces were done under “difficult” conditions. They are recycled because that is all the material (physically) I have to use, and I keep using them over and over. This is the difficult condition I’ll call “exile”—think of these works of art as being done from a prison, and I am a prisoner, living with “economic hardship.” I have limited supplies to use. The politics of these pieces thus, is part of my “shortage” of resources to produce cultural products in a “culture of fear” or what Henry A. Giroux has called the “carceral state” of a post-9/11 world.
At the psychospiritual level, these pieces reflect my time after completing a doctorate degree in Education (2003), and not having found gainful employment or career-climbing-ropes to status and power. I am an artist attempting to work in, with, and between the discipline and field of Education. An artist in Education is perhaps even an oxymoron. The artist challenges what Giroux calls a “pedagogy of fear” in an age of the “spectacle of terrorism” and regressive fundamentalism. For Education to contain freedom, as many believe it should, then the artist ought to have a significant role in facilitating an Education beyond fear.
When in prision, as I feel now, there is little chance to get a true hearing of my artist and my politics of fearlessness. I create art pieces to give voice to an expression of resistance to the fear that rules us... I cannot make symbols that people who control the prison will recognize. I have to make the content of the art appear “neutral.” Thus, I use the simple “circle” in the middle of each piece, and a “rectangular” border on each piece as standard “grounds” for each piece. The rest of the images are spontaneous, and the finished piece aesthetic... Yet, who among the prison guardians would see I am making art that is subversive? The pressure of doing art in the prison space is that you have to make it inarticulate, “neutral” to get it by the guardians. And once it gets out of the prison confines it becomes public pedagogy... where the depth, darkness, and suffering can be experienced (perhaps) by those willing to engage the art’s narrative... which I have now given you some clues.