Here is my artist statement for "Error of Judgment" my latest art exhibition currently at the Vergette Gallery, S. Illinois Univ. Carbondale campus... if you are around hope you'll visit it this week (see Photo for invitation poster and details):
artist statement
“We still appear to be motivated primarily by the primitive dual forces of
love and fear, and we still, for the most part, fear ‘the other’—the unknown
the strange, the distant.” -E. Kelly[1]
Error of Judgment is an exhibition of mixed media paintings/drawings I have made between 2011-14. The white series of “evocative objects” and dark series of “near intimacies” have been shown prior but I thought it would be good to combine some of each of these exhibits under a new theme of ‘error of judgment’ which refers to many things, not the least of which is my ongoing life-project researching on the relationship of the two great meta-motivational forces of Love and Fear.
In this exhibition I wanted to bring my scientific and spiritual explorations together with my aesthetic practices, especially as exemplified in the 2011-14 period. It has been a long fascination how my different “minds” and disciplinary interests mostly stay in their own worlds, sometimes slide up along side each other, and sometimes clash. I think in this exhibition I have allowed them to crash. That makes for fertile territories made by arbitrary boundaries, marked by CAUTION signals that enter the gallery space—reminding us of the everyday spaces we occupy and transgress under the current politics of a culture of fear and surveillance. Feel free to go over, under, and beyond the boundaries to participate in this installation, as I continually attempt to do in how I come to understand my own art-making in spaces of discomfort as much as pleasure.
Maybe with your feedback (feel free to leave comments) and the week long exhibition, by Friday’s artist talk I’ll say more about how this crash all makes some sense (or not).
-R. Michael Fisher
Sept. 20, 2015
Carbondale, IL
[1] Excerpt from Kelly, E. (2005). Powerful times: Rising to the challenge of our uncertain world. Pearson Education.
