The work in this exhibition of 15 new works continues my long-standing investigation of issues of embodiment and liminality but combines these abiding interests with a consideration of textuality, issues of being and how meaning is negotiated in the beginning of the 21^st Century.

Embodiment has been the theme of my visual work for more than 20 years. All we know is mediated through the body; we receive the surrounding world through our hands, eyes, ears, brain and it is through the body that we respond.  We think and see and perceive through the body.  All we know and do is mediated through the body.  The body is, therefore, in my work, the central site of meaning. This is not solipsism, but recognition that the body is inescapably what we are given. Perhaps for this reason I have continued to draw inspiration from and create visual images whose primary subject matter is the human body. The body is a potent vehicle of knowing and a potent communicator of content. In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty describes the body as not one object amongst many, but as the primary means of belonging to the world and facing our tasks, “it is through my body that I understand other people, just as it is through my body that I perceive ‘things’. The meaning of a gesture thus ‘understood’ is not behind it, it is intermingled with the structure of the world outlined by the gestures, and which I take up on my own account.” Bodies and their gestural languages are parsed constantly, consciously and unconsciously, in the course of daily interactions with others.  In his critique of pure reason, Kant believed that reason alone could go horribly, even monstrously wrong if it was not grounded in experience.  What we know is inextricably a mixture of what the senses give us and what the mind imposes.  Both are known through the body. 

Materiality has been the second investigation I have pursued.   For the past several years I’ve joined materials such as steel, lead, wax, ash and gold with the figure to explore its metaphoric potential. Encaustic is layered over graphite drawings then is juxtaposed with planes of materials.  This discovery has been exhilarating.  Materials such as steel, wax, gold, and lead carry meanings ranging from precious to toxic and when paired with the figure heighten a corporeal reading of the figure.  The meaning of body travels over these various materials.  

Signifiers of Meaning have appeared for the first time in this body of work.  Various symbols- topographical, aerial and navigational maps, PET scans (positron emission tomography scans) MRI scans, ECG readings, all contested medical imagery, stock market charts, literal texts (Heidegger, Derrida and Rilke textual conversation around “being”) are signifiers of meaning. Each is a kind language according to Saussure; each has a linguistic structure that functions much like a language. Wittgenstein talks of language games (in the Tractus, he explores the limits of language and suggests that images can express what language cannot).   Lacan talks of how meaning is not so much attached to a particular signifier but is made in the connections between chains of signifiers. Lyotard also famously draws on Wittgenstein’s language games and Saussure’s linguistic metaphor when he suggests that the rules of the game have utterly changes for art science and literature in the 20^th C.  Derrida plays with texts, and has famously said there is nothing outside of text-texts interact and do not need to refer to anything.  Combining Derrida and Saussure all these signifiers can be understood as texts.  And each of these texts collides with the body and materials to make meaning. The suspended figures, ECG readings, words from Heidegger, Derrida, and Rilke and layers of wax- each are meaning making texts that visually interact- they converse, collide and obscure each other.  Meaning emerges and is submerged.  

Liminality is the investigation that has occupied me for as long as I have been making work.  Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, studied the state of social transition in which an individual is neither in nor out of a particular identity, in an existence van Gennep called a “liminal” state.   Limen is Latin for ‘threshold’.  These are the aha! experiences, mystical experiences, experiences of knowing, Buddhist Enlightenment, I Thou, such ness, kairos, (the Greek word kronos, is ordinary time, the common, linear, minute-by-minute experience of time.  Kairos describes the fullness of time, experiences where time seems suspended) there are many, many names (and kinds) of these liminal experiences. Rites of passage, initiation rites, accidents, intense moments of joy or fear or pain can be catalysts for such insights. Dislocation, disorientation, disconnection is frequently part of the experience, through which a word or new insight is revealed, and thereafter, life seems absolutely different.  The mystical traditions within all religions try to understand and provide words for such experiences. (Liturgy marks and celebrates liminal experiences but liturgy is not the experience itself). 911 provoked a liminal experience of sorts for many.   After the planes crashed, the towers fell and the dust settled life seemed different.  To cite one example, the next day the Globe and Mail heralded the end of irony.   Liminal experiences change you in unpredictable ways.

Simone Weil, World War II era teacher, classical scholar, philosopher, social critic and mystic, used the Platonist term Metaxu to describe anything that could be a bridge or mediation between us and God. The created order, including the human body, is a barrier, but at the same time, it is a way through. “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall.  The wall is the thing that separates them but it is also their means of communication.  It is the same with us and God.  Every separation is a link.”Weil identifies the material realm, which includes the body, as a potent vehicle of liminal experiences, a position diametrically opposed to the dualistic separation of the body from the spiritual that also goes back to Plato. 

 “We say that Christianity is a religion of the word, but it is the word made flesh.  Perhaps we have forgotten the message contained in the foundations of this religion, that of the permanent joining of the body and signs.”Julia Kristeva sees the body as inseparable from an exploration of spiritual questions. Meaning is embedded in our very flesh, as it is in materials, and, in chains of signifiers texts or languages no matter how slippery and interchangeable they may be.

In Being and Time Heidegger laments that the presence of beings has dissolved into the transparency of their usefulness.  In a famous article he actually crosses out Being, leaving it visible beneath the mark, referring to technology’s reduction of embodied persons into merely useful instrumental tools.Rilke tells a similar tale albeit in a poetic language. For Derrida, being is erased but it does not actually disappear.  It is “one side of a difference…the mark of deletion is itself a trace… that joins and separates this mark and what it crosses out”.  Signs and texts are joined and separated while the figure remains suspended in a liminal moment.   “Clouds of linguistic combinations” and [disconnected] collisions between innumerable language games...still somehow are capable of making meaning.   Meaning emerges despite a seeming chaos or lack of rational connections between languages or signs.   Against all odds Aha!s still happen and being falls back into place, changed, erased, no doubt,  merely a fragile trace, but still stammering “fragments of your ancient name”. 

 Erica Grimm-Vance, David Squires, Jeff Warren, Stephen Stasson, Jim Dobbs

Encaustic, Steel, Positron Emission Tomography Scans, Graphite, on Baltic Birch Panels, Sound and Music triggered with light and sound sensors through Teleo and MAX/MSP, digital film

                        between

                                    stretching beyond

            the liminal       

                        bodily transcending the fixed/static/grounded/balanced self

            we live in these spaces/places that are between imaginary points

                                    the liminal of the rites of passage

                                                            between states of being

                        that are not fixed themselves

                                                between I and Thou

                                                            You and me

                                    struggling for but never finding

                                                balance

Lighting Designer: Gareth Griffiths

Studio and Installation Assistant: Josh Ebersole

PET scans courtesy of Shannon K, Campbell,  Adagietto from Symphony no.5 by Gustav Mahler courtesy of EMI Canada; Beep sound courtesy of LS and Escalator sound courtesy of lgarret through the Freesound project (http://freesound.iua.upf.edu) under the Creative Commons Licensce; thank you to Jamie Barrow and Lindsay Perth; and thank you to SSHRC and the TWU office of Research and Faculty Development for the funding to make this possible.

Embodiment has been the focus of my image making for the past twenty years. All we know is mediated through the body, making it, inescapably, the central site of meaning. I am not interested in the surface superficialities of the body but in going deeper, going inside in an exploration of states of being. My work uses encaustic layered over graphite drawings, usually of figures, and juxtaposes these figurative panels with planes of steel, gold and lead. In recent years, the discovery of material has been exhilarating.  Materials such as steel, wax, lead and gold carry meanings ranging from precious to toxic, and when paired with the figure, heighten a corporeal reading of the figure. I am interested in furthering the exploration of the meaning of body to include signs and symbols. Recent work juxtaposes depth maps (navigational charts) with the figure in an attempt to map the inner meanings of body.  One critic has described my work as engaging in the “post-ironic search for meaning.

The Body Knows explores the body and its relation to breath, the primal act and symbol of life.  The work explores an internal, contemplative gaze and deals with issues as elemental as the materials.  Breath, listening and attentiveness are corporeal and material matters that lead to wider spiritual questions.

The figurative work of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Betty Goodwin, Jim Dine and Stephen De Staebler has influenced my treatment of the figure.  Bill Viola’s images of figures passing through water and fire and his interest in ritual, states of being and transformation have influenced the concept of figure in my work.   Mark Rothko’s spiritualized color field paintings and Barnett Newman’s contemplative abstract expressionism have both influenced the formal construction of my work.

In this Small Torso the figure is juxtaposed with a silent plane of steel. The torso is suggested rather than overt, layered under many translucent layers of colored wax. A thin line of 23K gold creates the liminal edge between the two realities.

Embodiment has been the theme of my work for almost twenty years. All we know is mediated through the body, and as such, it is the central site of meaning. Simone Weil used the platonic word metaxu to describe anything that could be a bridge or mediation between us and God. The created order, including the human body, is a barrier and at the same time, it is a way through. “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing that separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.” The figures in most of my work echo Weil’s insistence on our bodily fragility. “Our flesh is fragile...our soul is vulnerable ... Our social personality is exposed to every hazard.” But it is precisely this intimate fragility that connects us at the core of our being to the cross of Christ.

The figures in most of my images are contrasted with silent planes of steel and gold, which heighten the corporeal, fragile, reading of the figure. In recent years, the discovery of material has been exhilarating. Materials carry meaning. Gold, steel, wax, ash, and lead are all ripe with metaphoric meanings ranging from precious to toxic. Weil would see both the human body and these materials as Metaxu, bridges between us and God. Hence, both the body and materials are potential sites of transcendence.