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Barbara Bickel |
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Barbara Bickel is an artist, researcher, educator and independent curator. She is currently working on a Ph.D. in Art Education (Curriculum Studies) at The University of British Columbia, where her arts-based research is focused on women, spiritual leadership, collaboration and education. Barbara completed an MA in Education at The University of British Columbia in 2004. She holds a BFA in Painting from The University of Calgary and a BA in Sociology and Art History from the University of Alberta. Her art and performance rituals have been exhibited and performed in Canada since 1991. She is currently represented by the Kensington Fine Art Gallery in Calgary, Alberta, and the School of Ideas Gallery in Welland, Ontario. She co-founded The Centre Gallery (1995-2001), a non-profit women's focused gallery in Calgary, Alberta. Her art portfolio and thesis can be viewed on-line at http://www.barbarabickel.ca
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For visual artist, Barbara Bickel, the figure is a profound vehicle of expression. Emotions, psychological postures, political stances and many more intangible realities of the human condition are evoked in the gestures of her figures. - Yvonne Owens, art historian & art writer Uncovering the wisdom of the body and drawing that expression into full visibility through opening and holding open sacred space, collaboration, ritual, and living inquiry, led Bickel to work non-traditionally within the traditional art process of drawing. She withholds the artist's colonizing gaze and invites the body to speak from its own center. She works from the premise that spirit expresses itself through the act of art making. This has enabled her art to tap into the unending resource of the erotic, which the late poet Audre Lorde defined as "an assertion of the lifeforce” of creative energy empowered."” Her 2D and 3D studio practice has yielded mixed media drawings, collages on wood, and body cast sculptures that offer her a physical entryway into the inquiry process. Reading and representing the body as a contested site of knowledge has drawn her more deeply into relational and embodied excavations of inquiry. Each art piece is an inter-relational journey between the subject/co-creator, the surface/landscape/mindscape, and the art medium. Early in her career the community-based nature of her practice led to performance rituals. These performance rituals most often take place within the gallery where the living, breathing, gestural body enters a direct relationship with the art. Through collaboration with others, her art expands beyond personal experience to collective social ritual that draws upon and honours all aspects of the creative inquiry process. Adding an historiographic and ethnographic component to the inquiry process, her recent art has expanded to include digital video installations. Video material is gathered from documentation of the creative inquiry process and spontaneous and rehearsed performance rituals. Within the gallery, looping videos are projected onto pre-marked wood, fabric, or paper, blending static art materials with the dynamic performing body.
CONTACT
Address: #305 - 1580 East Third Ave. Vancouver BC. V5N 1G9 Catagories: Artist, Researcher, Educator, Independent Curator Email: radicaltrust@shaw.ca
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