[-empyre-] Moving out of the shadows...

Jennifer Fisher jefish at yorku.ca
Sat Mar 27 10:02:28 AEDT 2021


Hi All,

The week has flown by. I’ve been distracted by the practical demands of moving (exhausting) and by a flurry of renovations to get us back in the house (distracting) after the catastrophic flood in July that had us living up the street in a rental for 8 months. Over the winter, Jim and I interviewed Linda M. Montano about her Tarot readings during her durational work 14 Years of Living Art. When we related our dislocated state, she suggested that we speak to the house and meditate on the meaning of water, of flooding. But since we’ve been back, we have yet to pose this art/life contemplation to the space, or hold it in a meditation. Hopefully soon…I’ll draw inspiration from Erika’s remarkable investigations holding objects at Hospitalfield and seeing what feelings and images emerge.

Ann – thank you for sharing authors that have inspired your thinking on alternative ways of knowing through the senses. In a recent talk by Dylan Robinson I was struck by his description that, for Indigenous people, going to museums to see historicized ancestors (ritual objects which are considered to be living beings) behind glass vitrines was like visiting a relative in prison where glass separates and privileges the visual sense. Decolonizing museums will involve negotiations and practices of de-incarcerating indigenous artifacts, which will mean providing access to Indigenous communities to once again handle historicized ancestors during ceremony, and ultimately returning them to their communities.

I’m eager to relate some thoughts about intuitive practices that, in Ann’s sense, “linger in the shadows of scholarly work.” Years ago, it was a great joy for me to walk the circuit of Winnipeg Tarot readers with Bev Pike, whose remarkable post this morning brought me back to that time, particularly a gifted, tactful and insightful reader named Trevor, then working out of a bookstore. These adventures occurred during my stint as a Mentor for artists under the auspices of Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (an amazing artist-run organization in Winnipeg). The sheer thrill of these investigations, the readings themselves and being hosted at the home of Serena Keshavjee, a scholar of Spiritualism, in many ways seeded what was to become Technologies of Intuition (which arrived in fits and starts several years later). My passion to explore intuition and the paranormal is longstanding and has involved childhood intuitive epiphanies, my father’s near-death experience, two psychic grandmothers, which led to decades of engagement with spiritual teachers and yogic traditions (including Neem Karoli Baba, Swami Nityananda, Swami Chidvalasanda and Mata Amritanandamayi). But until now I have held back on speaking directly to these experiences in my writing, choosing instead to explore such interests in relation to artists who engage with aspects of spirit and spiritual practice. While intuitive practice has sustained me, I tended to retain these engagements within a kind of shadow trajectory (after Ann), a parallel CV of travels, studies and turning points, a much-sustaining life obscured from my academic career. I found Alex’s research on the “declarative self-presence and spectrality” of voice fascinating, particularly in its recognition that voices can be embodied and disembodied. Finding an appropriate standpoint and authorial voice to embody has been a challenge for me. Looking back, I have found that moving from more distanced observation towards a first person standpoint has allowed for more immersed perceptions that I now understand as autotheoretical.

Warmly,

Jennifer

Jennifer Fisher
Professor Contemporary Art and Curatorial Studies
Department of Visual Art and Art History CFA 252
York University 4700 Keele Street
Toronto, Ontario  M3J 1P3
jefish at yorku.ca

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