Stages, in PublicA series on coping

This is a series of paintings modeled around the Kubler-Ross stages of grieving and

living with disability.

Stages, in Public 2014

It addresses the deformative, non-medical

effect that dealing with loss in a daily dose has on an

individual.

"Impostor" (denial), 2014 36”x48”, spray paint and marker on canvas

"Impostor" (denial), 2014 36”x48”, spray paint and marker on canvas

This is part of a series on the Kubler-Ross model of stages of grieving. Currently I am developing this as a

representation of Denial, and the way in which it masks our anger. It is the first stage, and deals with how we come to

know our new self.

Denial is a state of turning away from the loss. Avoidance and fear and anxiety drive this, but ultimately this stage is

marked by a skepticism of loss that deforms all of our activity. We scorn the loss, ignore it, and refuse to allow it to

speak for us. There is also a fear of the loss that derives from the social and political; this in turn brings out the specter

of our own inner impostor.

This impostor is a trickster. It parades us in the reality of the loss, then in the crippling self-assurances of the non-

reality of the loss. We fear our own lack of knowing, and our drowning in the seas of identity loss, and look out on

ourselves as some fake. We mistake the masquerade of coping for insincerity, and the insincerity as falseness.

This stage knows no self; there is no hard foundation of ego to appeal to when we are reeling from the loss of what we

think we are.

"Staying" (anger), 2014

36”x48”, oil and marker on canvas

"Staying" (anger), 2014

36”x48”, oil and marker on canvas

This is part of a series on the Kubler-Ross model of stages of grieving. This particular one represents the public face we display, and how anger helps us to escape in it. In turn, it creates a dependency on that projection, and an intransigence toward acceptance of the changes or adjustments demanded of coping.

The anger compensates for our lack of completeness; what we put forward is some approximation how to guard against our fears. We throw it up as a barricade. Weird thing about it, we think of ourselves when we’re angry and try to project this thing. We think we’re throwing up the same thing, and we’re being consistent. This behavior tries to suggest we’re not losing ground. We may not be actively deluding ourselves into thinking we’re gaining any either. But in order to avoid thinking about loss, we use a mask that requires focusing our energy on projecting, rather than letting it actually assess where we really are.

"Forms in black and white" (bargaining), 2014

36”x48”, spray paint and marker on canvas

"Forms in black and white" (bargaining), 2014

36”x48”, spray paint and marker on canvas

This piece portrays Bargaining in the Kubler Ross stages of grieving. “Forms in black and white” represents the feigning of submissiveness inherent in bargaining. For persons with disabilities, being trapped up in complex and not always efficient systems relies on a good deal of filling out forms, learning what passing and assimilation are effective at, and learning which identity to adopt and when.

This process creates artifacts of personhood through the constant process of identity performance and the process of interpreting and creating meaning in each interaction. It distorts who we are, it exaggerates who we want to present, and tells us we better not let anyone know what we aren’t. The process makes us feel less than human and like some manifestation of all the fear we hold against our bodies.

"Leaving" (depression), 2014

36”x48”, oil and marker on canvas

"Leaving" (depression), 2014

36”x48”, oil and marker on canvas

This piece represents Depression in the Kubler Ross stages of grieving. This is confronting the kind of depression that involves the way in which we become overwhelmed by demands of our new identity. We can be taken in by the lack of personal attachment to our past, and to the new constraints after a loss

For me this one is a big deal because it ties in my bad bitmap art in a way that adds to the metaphor. The underlying problem the title leaving is meant to pose, is that this is a perpetual state. The work of constructing identity is being overwritten on an everyday basis. This is a big deal. And we all do it everyday. We do it to each other, it gets done to us; social pressure thinks the pipe beneath the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink is a great incubator for how we construct ourselves.

"Leaving" (depression), 2014

36”x48”, oil and marker on canvas

The painting unfolds and the paint puts up the texture of the piece. Then on top, someone came along and drew some kind of structure on top of the texture. Its durable, they even touch it up toward the end. Then after that someone said with a dark marker that the dark parts will happen, and someone said with the red marker that the bleeding would happen. Then after some highlights happened.

Then along came someone with a bright green marker. They put some fun up, and some dark green said that it would be profound. Then there had to be muted blue to said you’d be respected and structured. And then the bright orange let them know that there would be steps and routine and it was important. Finally the pink came and gave some flesh.

All those things happen every day. Except you’re losing and writing your most critical parts.

"Tomato" (acceptance), 2014

36”x48”, oil on canvas

"Tomato" (acceptance), 2014

36”x48”, oil on canvas

This piece represents Acceptance in the Kubler Ross stages of grieving. A big driver behind its inclusion in the series is that the expression on the face is all about that gradual realization:

that moment of realization and acceptance but not resolution; when you realize that all the relief you thought you’d get for suffering and coping and grieving, all the relief you thought would be repaid based on all of that work, that you’ve gotten to the end of all that labor and you birth no relief.

This painting is about memories. They are painful and they are everything. Memories can either be abstract or realistic, but they still represent a time something happened where you needed to make a kind of horcrux and splinter a part of your soul so you could save it for later. Each splinter has the same flavor of who you were at the time. You lose that to make the memory.

Realistic memories are about creating a truth to live by. That truth is what keeps you alive. You preserve it to make sure you don't need to splinter yourself again. It wards you from that same thing, but it also separates that one thing from you.

Abstract memories are not meant to warden moments but to bind them and include them in who you are like glass armor. They are not meant to contain truth. To make it work in your favor next time. Memories bent on abstraction, rather than capture, are meant to be accurate. They deconstruct and destroy reality so that abstract notions about the world can be used to neutralize the reality around them.

The one throws up burning walls between the rememberer; the other exiles to the frozen abyss.

"Tomato" (acceptance), 2014

36”x48”, oil on canvas

Often we attribute the work of lifting emotions to some misogynistic construct of woman’s work. Perhaps this is why it is so undervalued and we have such an aversion to actually performing the work that it is. There is a topography to pain, and coping represents the counterbalance to that injury. Kubler-Ross’s stages of grieving present a good metaphor for interpreting the phases of emotional work we perform after that injury.

Acceptance identifies that for all the work we do during injury, and all the rehabilitation we subconsciously perform after during grieving, there is only a block of energy we pour into the latter to offset the emotional loss of the former. Emotional capacity is a trait that can explain both how someone can pull farflung emotional coordinates into a coherent picture, as well as how someone can render such detail and clarity in a very localized area of emotional impact. The more one turns inward to one’s pain, and its consequent coping, the more one can build that emotional capacity. This takes excruciating honesty and bravery.

Losing family members, loved ones, and any number of others is but a preface to the on-going work that goes into coping with a disability. The constant threat of injury, the actual occurrences, the paperwork that goes into cleaning up after (that you, the disabled person are responsible for financially and socially and medically), and the dread of things getting worse are all daily tasks carried out as not only meat and blood tasks, but also in units of emotional work. Living with this constant violence is not an issue relegated to the non-neurotypical, or the more broadly disabled. Rather, it is lived by every person caught in the gutters of some axis of privilege where the world is constructed in diametric opposition to your position.

"Tomato" (acceptance), 2014

36”x48”, oil on canvas

I know this sounds hyperbolic, maybe it is; but I'll never get back the emotions I could have invested in people I love instead of the world of non-disabled privilege. There's no relief, but that's okay it’s why I've been working on building emotional capacity.

We are trained to see acceptance as some goal, not an end result. When we pursue closure, resolution, and acceptance too precipitously, we try to avoid doing the emotional work of truly grieving by rushing through the minefield, typically leaving mines to find later. When we forego these things, when we suspend all efforts of grieving, when we are addicted to the pain we turn our back on doing the work and get absorbed in the injury. Living with a disability, there is no clear topography; the injuries come and they go, the grieving is continuous.

We rush the work, and we suspend the work, and sometimes we do the work. It doesn’t end, though. Nonetheless, we perform the role of grieving through to some exhibition of acceptance; even if its incomplete, at least everyone will know they don’t need to worry about us anymore, and we don’t need to worry about taking up their time. Still, we are left with some morsel of relief, some release from the pain, fleeting though it may be. Perhaps we are caught up in our own performances, perhaps we even feel whole again for a time. Occasionally, our fragments don’t seem so isolated, our body feels like we own it again.

Artist's Statement

Coping is a broad category of behavior that covers how we humans deal with loss. Kubler-Ross has one of the most well-known models for describing the process; she breaks it down in the stages of Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. Most frequently, these are referred to as the stages of grieving.

Grieving is most often associated with death and mourning but can be applied to a much broader field of coping; divorce, unemployment, relocation. Many of us are performing the work of grieving in an unstructured way across multiple layers of our lives at any given time. Further, there is a perception that the stages are progressive; one moves steadily through the five phases and one's work is done.

In the lives of people living with chronic conditions, disabilities, and other permanent changes or impairments, this process is an on-going one that will never reach some final resolution. In the case of disability, a person needs to not only deal with the medical impact of the impairment on her or his life, but also the additional social, political, and economic consequences that accompany living in a world that is structured around the needs of nondisabled individuals.

Artist's Statement

Judith Butler's work with Performativity (1) is incredibly illustrative here, as is Simi Linton's work with disability studies (2). Too often we reduce a person's living situation to a set of essentialist assumptions about her or his body based on the gender or impairment of the person. We frequently follow that by assessing a series of deterministic expectations and holding her or him to them. This in turn forces us to see persons as individuals who are constrained by their failures rather than persons, with active wills responding to structural pressures.

However, Performativity tells us that frequently an individual is not acting out from some essential set of qualities dictated by their gender (or impairment), but rather behavior is meant to affect some role in society in order to achieve some objective. Further, Linton's work around disability informs us that disability (like gender) is a construction perpetuated by the fallacious division of the world into disabled and "able" bodies; a division that is not only inaccurate but also exclusive because it does not seek to unite us in some spectrum of human variation but rather to define us by some medical deviance.

As an individual with a disability, I have personally experienced and learned through the narratives of others in similar situations, that our role is not some fixed thing. The role of 'person with a disability' is not constantly performed by persons who would fit that description. A recent book, Disability and Passing edited by Jeffrey A. Brune and Daniel J. Wilson (3), does a fantastic job of cataloging individuals and situations in which people both chose to pass as nondisabled, and instances where they acquiesced to their role as disabled for specific causes.

Artist's Statement

After more than twenty years of living with a disability, it has become apparent to me that the role of 'person with a disability' is not one I want to perform at all times for all purposes. Had I informed each of my college professors that I was disabled, I may have eventually run into issues being permitted in buildings or denied entry to class rooms. Had my skydiving instructor been informed of my condition, he may have considered his liability insurance more important than my assurances that being two years' seizure free meant he had little to worry about. Had I not told my employers' of my disability and how to handle first aid, I may have come to more serious ends than I did.

This series of paintings is meant to capture the stages of grief while dealing with the fluid dynamics of shifting social, political, and economic contexts. The five stages are generally pretty well understood by a vast majority of people, both through their ubiquity as emotions for coping and the human commonness of grieving; most people have at some point grieved and dealt with loss through these emotions. This makes them an apt metaphor for describing specific interactions with a greater depth than a straightforward narrative would accomplish.

Referenced Works:

1. Butler, Judith. Gender trouble feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.

2. Linton, Simi. Claiming disability knowledge and identity. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Print.

3. Brune, Jeffrey A.. Disability and passing: blurring the lines of identity. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013. Print.

Artist's Statement

Some current series and projects:● Stages in Public: http://bit.ly/stages-in-public● The “Normate Gaze” proposal:

http://bit.ly/normategaze● Deviant Art Portfolio: http://mfgink.deviantart.com/● Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matthewgilboy● Tumblr: http://mfg.tumblr.com/● Twitter: https://twitter.com/mfgink

History of pieces and work:● Fiscal Sponsorship 2014: Fractured Atlas for the

“Normate Gaze” Series● Misc. Pieces in Friends’ Collections, No Museums or

Galleries, Few Showings● Juried: Annual Student Juried Exhibition 2004,

McDonough Museum of Art, OH, recipient of Starr Award

● Lecture: OSU, 2008 - On the significance of copyright & when to use CC licensing

● Upcoming displays: Chicago Diner, Pancakes and Booze, (stuff penciled in)

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