Flow Exhibit - Capital City Art, Gallery at Milner

Ebb and flow describes the rhythm of life — the flow of the seasons, the flow of time. The flow of the North Saskatchewan River has shaped the city that Edmonton has become. Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free (Zhuangzi).

As a visual artist what does FLOW mean to you? (My response below)

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I painted the Generative series with the challenge of separating the life course and frequently associated so-called energies of the generational time within a different contexts of time, identity and perception.  Generational time is represented by me capturing the light in green, symbolic of the so-called generational energies. The similarity of the leaves on the left and right suggest a repetition, a looping of time and generations, but in a limited way. I have yet to learn how to paint infinite time within the limitations of a canvas.

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I chafed at what was constantly referred to as the normative flow of ‘life course’- represented by the band of flowers and leaves;

But there was a hermeneutical lacuna where the name of a distinctive social experience should be (Fricker, 2006).  I had always been doing things ‘at the wrong time’.  I came to understand the uncomfortable expectancy as  chrononormativity.  The normative force Is so great, it is almost invisible.

 

Freeman (2010) describes chrononormativity as the process by which “naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation” (p. 3) in a progression of teleological schemes such as birth, development, education, amassing wealth and possession, starting a family, working and raising children, retirement, leave an inheritance and die when all value is extracted.

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The barely formed flower operates on a different time, as does the thistle

 

Queer and crip time are out of joint with cisheteronormative ableist notions of time. but I love the potential that queering time proffers.

 

Here, I have tried to depict the fullness of time along the normative lifecourse, but with a thistle, pokily leaning backwards, in a different shape than the other elements, as to suggest that their development, growth and existence are not bound by the expected  biopoitical, normative flows of life. The queering thistle questions the Linkages between time, and the movement of a generation of bodies

 

The thistle questions the requirements of productivity, and reproduction that have straitjacketed their predecessors. To formulate an understanding of futurity, the flow of ‘life' that is counter to such normative articulations, we  must turn a conception of space–time outside neoliberal capitalist reproductive logics. 

 

There is complexity in the normative lifecourse, about: time, money,  accumulation and consumption. Time and money are conflated and distorted by the speed at which both time, money and indeed the body itself are required to move. The weight of the slower moving body in age is depicted on the right, in the sagging flower

 

The slower movement manifests in market devaluation for labour deemed unfit for service with ageing but inculcates those bodies for the less rigorous demands of frenetic action. Now the ageing body is expected to find meaning by volunteering with what remains of their life- in other words, work for free. 

 

“Thinking through accessible futures means  addressing the exclusions of feminist and queer political visions of an alternative future, and the questioning reliance on ideologies of wholeness,