To keep updated as to my arts-based research go to the Arts Based Research Studio ning (you may even want to join up). My art research has naturally emerged from my explorations as an artist, an art educator, and art therapeutic consultant and facilitator. I like to think a lot about art and art processes. I like to study aesthetics. Yet, underneath my explorations since the mid-1980s has been the way "fear" takes its place in art-making and images. I want to know how those images affect the maker and those who observe the images. The Fear Factor is a major part of my research and thus it enters into a lot of my art research. Some of these earlier explorations are summarized at ART FEAR Research Project.See also Art Therapeutics. The Colombian-Canadian 'Fear' Vaccine Project was one of the more fascinating group rituals using art to heal through the fear, which was initiated in Colombia by a psychotherapist (Maria A. Solerzano) hired by the government of Bogota to transform the fear and violence on the streets at Halloween (Day of the Dead) in 1997. I modified some of her work and did a similar project in my home city in Canada with school children. It was powerful to see the role of art with trauma.
ARTIST-In-Residence project in collaboration with artist (my life-partner) Barbara Bickel have also been an exciting way to put art-based practices into relationship and community building, so if you're interested go to a 2015 interview series (audio files) Barbara and I did in W. Canada while she was on a 6 mo. sabbatical, entitled: Parallel Recordings
Another project in 2007 was setting up a large plexiglass container with images of fear in our world and allowing people to respond in drawing and text with paper and crayons. This was placed in a local public library for a month. People put their responses in the container and I took them out and made an art exhibit in the public library at the end. The poster to the left shows it was all about "Dialoguing on 'Fear'" using art and expressive means.
During my dissertation 2003, I used imagery and narrative forms and aesthetics from The Wachowski Bros. sci-fi action film The Matrix (1999) to inform and re-present my research on the culture of fear, leadership, and education. A few years later I applied the film-making sequential approach to a/r/tography, a new method in arts-based research, and created a show entitled "Fearology of Technology" which was my phenomenological research into the experience of schooling and blackboards and images and how they led to a culture of fear experience as dominant for me in terms of education. The full exhibition of this research series is published online: "Fearology of Technology."
The photo below, part of my dissertation arts-based research (2002), is from the Student's Center art gallery at UBC, where I installed 72 images on a white linen sheet set as a dinner table (after Judy Chicago's piece decades earlier), whereby you'll see the ways I depict the culture of fear and point to how we are consuming fear at an enormous rate. Re: The Matrix film, you'll notice the blue and red pill choice!
The four rectangular shapes to the left are foundational to my A-Dness aesthetics research since the mid-1980s. To this day, I utilize this tool for assessing the Love-Fear index with clients and other populations. I have surveyed over 800 people using this diagram with many of the same questions.
The document below will give you a survey package you may do at home and send it to me for analysis for free, and I'll add it to my database.
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A-D values survey copy.pdf Size : 3364.405 Kb Type : pdf |
Below is my updated ART CV
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CVARTS2.DOC Size : 54 Kb Type : DOC |
What would it mean to artfully put all of the most important women fear researchers I know of onto one image? These are explorations still in progress as an artist-fearologist.
And one of my favorite artist-researchers these days is the psychoanalyst and activist Bracha L. Ettinger. I quote from her journals of exploring art process in a deep way that resonates with my inquiries. She wrote,
"It's only in a system without Matrix [archaic feminine] that partial objects become dangerous; they take themselves for totalities and behave like metaphors or metonymies." -Bracha L. Ettinger
Recent digital photoshopping is part of my repertorie of art skills and it is a fascinating way to perform ideas really quickly in complex visuals without a lot of handwork. The image below is also using an "avatar" I created of myself and it is being used in various ways as another perspective on my research and art. See the recent images and writing I have done on this at the virtual Museum of Fearology (see Occupy Fear posters I've been creating).
For more Art Research Projects (re: Jane Goodall) click on this image below.
