Artist Statement: Barbara M. Bickart

Fall 2019

I am an interdisciplinary artist with formal training in the lens-based practices of video/filmmaking and photography. I make art because I like to open conversations. I teach because I like to open conversations about how art making can be used in the service of making the world a more just place. Most of my professional work as an artist has been grounded in working collaboratively with communities in struggle around issues of social justice. These paintings have emerged from my sensibilities as a video/filmmaker/photographer together with my desire to make sense of the tumultuous times we are living in, as everything I care about most is under siege.

Working with small frames in this on-going body of work, I have been exploring the concept of PAUSE, brought on by my own longing to slow down in a world that is driven ever-faster by the digital revolution. I am interested in how we orient and archive ourselves, our lives, in time and space outside of the world of electronics and the internet. Handwriting, maps, photographic prints, are all documents that orient us very specifically to a place, time, state of mind, person, relationship, or moment. They are also all forms of documentation and communication that are in danger of obsolescence, that I find beautiful and lyrical and metaphoric reminders.

I love that handwriting is specific and unique to an individual, like a thumbprint. I love the intimacy that handwriting represents; I love receiving a handwritten letter or note, knowing that there was a real person on the other end of the communication, who paused to collect a thought or two and to write it down with the intention of communicating something, conveying an idea, exchanging information. I think of maps and analogue photographs in the same way. The signature of the mapmaker and the photographer, the historical moment they lived in, their worldview, cultural mores, biases, cultural and physical boundaries, perceived geographies, and time are all embedded in these documents representing layers of information in a single freeze- frame.

With this body of work, I have sent out a call to people, asking for a handwritten note about a moment of PAUSE from their own lives. With each of these frames, I am exploring and considering a glimpse of personal topography, having to do with what is fleeting and basic and ephemeral within a PAUSE.

The pieces are named/numbered chronologically, to represent the individual moments of Pause in which they were created.