Blog
River Jackson-Paton, Ph.D.
in praise of belly buttons…
for much of my life
my belly button had no meaning
it may as well have not existed
granted at one point i pierced it
parks, art, & history
went to a very well attended. lively and informative meeting about arts and cultural policy in dallas the other day, organized in part by my new home Sunset Art Studio. one topic that came up was about whether parks & rec could coordinate public art, especially...
sites and non-sites…
when people ask me what my artistic medium is, i frequently describe my primary one as collage and assemblages. it's interesting in this moment to be attempting to put together a series of articles and ideas, and realizing that it's an assemblage, too. a variation on...
works in process…
after an absence, i return gathering a variety of materials physical and more nuanced attempting to offer them to the world ~ inspired by a talk by gabor maté on the "myth of normal" i am creating an (ab)normality cycle to illustrate the non-linear experience of...
bridging divisions; or, resisting binaries…
this is another attempt to make connections between stuff that's crossed my path, and this week's theme is the endless suffering caused by binaries! in gender, race, science, mental health, academics, these notions of right/wrong, healthy/sick, black/white,...
revising gender in ethnoautobiography…
Jürgen and i are underway with revising a couple of chapters in our book on Ethnoautobiography: Jürgen's working on the community chapter, Community and Communitas. I am spending some time with En/gendering Embodied Ethnoautobiography. In re-reading the chapter...
trump and the witchery…
not unlike Harry Potter, i have mixed feelings about invoking the name of he-who-shall-not-be-named. do we kid ourselves, and give away our power when we focus on Trump, and not all of the history, legacies, etc. that puts him there? indeed i found this fabulous...
objects and places…
next week a special exhibition opens at the Amon Carter museum in Fort Worth, Border Cantos, with work by Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo. this exhibit brings together numerous strands that i gather together in my work. i first heard about Misrach's monumental...
collecting dis- words
embodied trans*formation episode 1: Collecting dis-words 9-21-16 This story began as an effort to experience the relationship between shame and trauma. I have a number of references that I glanced at, including van der Kolk’s (2014) The Body Keeps the Score, but I...
embodied conflict and permanent fear
due to a variety of reasons (yes, one of them is Trump!), i picked up my 2012 dissertation this week and happened upon a section that seemed exceptionally timely: "Embodied conflict and permanent fear". (i'll go into more about that later, hell i might even upload...