Envisioning Life

As we know from dreams and fantasies, images can allow for the production of meaning and affect that might be inaccessible through words. There are many ways to know, think, and feel and the specific mode of symbolizing influences what is likely to be known or perceived or enacted and what is likely to be missed because of the characteristics or property of the mode itself. For this weekend, we will be focused on visual forms of thinking, feeling, and communicating in both writing and in therapy.

Our guest faculty will help us to consider what might happen if we consciously and deliberately expand our ways of thinking and knowing to include and work with graphic images in our writing and in our work. We will consider how the creation of time and space in graphic novels function through the gaps that function as projective screens and how the uses of images prompt both the thought and the unthought known, suggesting consideration of how we work unconsciously.

We will explore what drawings and photography might practically add to our own ability to understand and tell a story and to experience and discuss what is evoked for our patients and ourselves when moved into this mode of communication.

Coordinator: Gail Boldt, Ph.D.

GUEST FACULTY:

ONA LINDQUIST, LSCW is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City, specializing in work with creative and performing artists. She has taught and supervised at the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health, NYC, The Karen Horney Institute, NYC, and CAPA.  After entering a second analysis in 2002, she began reading and writing poetry. Her articles include “What a Blackbird Told Me is Real and Alive,” focusing on the relationship between poetry and the use of language in psychoanalysis. Her conceptual art project, Objet Vend’art byVendona, won her wide attention as an artist making and dispensing art for the masses. Her visual memoir of the project is at: objetsvendart.com.

RACHEL MARIE-CRANE WILLIAMS earned an M.F.A in Studio Art and a Ph.D. in Art Education from Florida State U. She is an Associate Professor at The University of Iowa in the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies Department and in the School of Art and Art History. Her scholarship related to incarcerated women, comics, qualitative research, and visual art has been published in Visual Arts Research, Studies in Art Education, Southern Cultures, The International Journal of Comics Art, The Journal of Art Education, and the Journal of Poetry Therapy. She is currently working on a graphic manuscript about the 1943 riot in Detroit. Rachel’s work is available at http://rachelwilliams.squarespace.com/.

Further faculty will be announced at a later date.