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DELICATE SENSIBILITIES

Double-Sided Serigraph, 11" x 14", 2007

Click on image for Fisher's prints

Translation: One evening in 2005 six American civilians, including myself, were sitting around a table having drinks and talking. Our daughter had been born recently, and I mentioned how I was now very interested in her morning bowel movements. We could read them like coffee grounds, divining the future of our day by observing the consistency of her poop. Loose and brightly colored could mean a day of general irritability. Dark, rich and firm might see a day of laughter and energy. This particular interest in her came as a surprise to me, I said, but had become a morning ritual. One at the table immediately expressed his displeasure with the topic. "That's disgusting! Having to smell that shit, disgusting. Don't even talk about it. How could anybody think baby shit is something to talk about."

The conversation shifted. Quiet dialogues began, some drank silently, someone left. After a few minutes the war in Iraq was mentioned. The group began to debate the legality of the war, and the correct way to achieve its resolution. This was a politically diverse group of acquaintances and the discussion was civil, but lively. The man who earlier found the idea of infant feces to be revolting, spoke with a calm, assured voice. "What we need to do, and I'm talking about the whole fucking Middle East, we need to nuke the shit out of them. Nuke the whole goddamn place."

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SEMPER FI

Performance Action, Georgia College, 2007

Grim Reaper: "Good morning."

Marine Recruiter: "I wish my buddies were here..."

Click here for full text and images


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EXECUTIVE BRANCH SUITE

Public Offering, 10' x 12' X 18', 2007

"Please use the provided charcoal, pencils, markers, erasers, and all other means to..."

Click here for full text and images of "Executive Branch Suite (Phase I)"


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COLONIAL TOWERS

Richard A. Lou and Bill Fisher, Mixed Media Construction, 80" x 24" X 24", 2006-07

"Exploring the construction of enemies and how that construction, and its inherent racist hierarchy, is used to justify the subjugation of communities of color..."

Click here for full text and images of "Colonial Towers."

Colonial Towers in "Art Papers"


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Seritypes: A Genetic Screening Project
Send an email, an attached image, a little DNA:

In answer to those who would demand we disregard the Constitution and common decency and live in silent, surveilled fear of unseen, dark enemies as proof of our patriotism, we now reaffirm our belief in a shared humanity.



The Human Genome Project has proven the concept of Race to be a construct, and illustrates the infinitesimal biological difference between individuals. We deny race, gender, borders and the construct of "other," a key mechanism in the dehumanization of the Oppressed and the Oppressor. We affirm the fundamental parity of all individuals as revealed through analysis of the human genome.

Update: Combining the genetic material supplied by hundreds of international participants with our serigraphic inks, the phenotypes of the (arguably) two most powerful men on the planet merge. Though seemingly polar opposites politically and philosophically, their rich common ground is now reified for all to witness.

Click here for full text of "Seritypes."

Seritypes in "Art Papers"



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MISSING STEREOTYPES, Postering Project (Richard Lou and Bill Fisher), 8" x 10", 2005

Click here to download a full resolution 8 x 10 pdf file for printing and posting.


¡Missing Stereotypes Missing!: Projects Censored in Georgia Exhibition: Click Here

MISSING STEREOTYPES MISSING, Postering Project (Richard Lou and Bill Fisher), 8" x 10", 2005

 Click here to download a full resolution 8 x 10 pdf file for printing and posting.

After being invited to exhibit his work, Richard Lou has had "Missing Stereotypes" as well as other collaborative and solo work censored by the Quinlan Visual Arts Center of Gainesville, Georgia. The work was removed from their show "Celebración" on orders from the Board of Directors, friends of the Wilbanks family.

Press
AP Article
Gainesville Times
Vivir Latino Interview

MISSING CELEBRACION, Postering Project (Richard Lou and Bill Fisher), 8" x 10", 2005

 Click here to download a full resolution 8 x 10 pdf file for printing and posting.

Missing Stereotypes - public art piece. Distributing art-posters in Duluth, Georgia and sending T-Shirts with same image to principals in the Jennifer Wilbanks saga.

Bill Fisher and Richard A. Lou's "Missing Stereotypes" explores the media's narration of the "Runaway Bride", Jennifer Wilbanks, and her mythically racist account of being "kidnapped" at gun point and sexually assaulted by a Hispanic man and white woman....

Noam Chomsky warns us about the media's ability to focus and enlarge the unimportant in order to deflect attention on matters that are vitally important to us as a nation interested in emulating a form of democracy. We fall in love/hate and are consumed with the tragic-comic figure of Wilbanks instead of focusing on issues that affect us profoundly and daily like sexism, racism, the lack of health care, U.S. invasion of Iraq, the legal and physical abuse of prisoners by U.S. armed forces, homelessness, global warming, HIV-Aids, poverty, the criminalization of dissent through the Patriot Act ­ unfortunately with the media saturation of the absurdly banal we have a populace that is mesmerized and paralyzed with the similar wide-eyed vapid gaze of a Jennifer Wilbanks.

Missing Stereotypes - T-Shirt gifts great for travel or weddings. It's in the mail! Below is the list of our projected recipients: 1. Jennifer Wilbanks. 2. John Mason - fiancée. 3. Claude Mason - fiancée father and ex-Mayor of Duluth, municipal court judge in Norcross, Georgia. 4. Danny Porter - Gwinnett County District Attorney. 5. Randy Belcher - City of Duluth Police Chief. 6. Carter Brank, assistant special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. 7. Shirley Lasseter - Duluth Mayor. 8. Superior Court Judge Ronnie K. Batchelor. 9. Elaine Reyes - 11Alive's reporter. 10. Ray Schultz - Albuquerque Police Chief. 11. Ryan Kelly, owner of the Park Cafe a few blocks from Wilbanks' house.

Richard Lou and Bill Fisher, 2005


Click here for full text of "Missing Stereotypes."

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No Hate Crimes (Reported)

NY/TX: No Hate Crimes (Reported)

Public Arts Project Proposal, Bill Fisher,2005

NY/TX: No Hate Detail

Public Arts Project Proposal, 2005


GA: No Hate Crimes (Reported)

Public Arts Project Proposal, Bill Fisher,2005

GA: No Hate Detail

Public Arts Project Proposal, 2005


For widespread distribution, each billboard would carry information relevant to its geographical location.

Modeled on the "No Traffic Fatalities in ____ Days" signs seen in some communities. The information is communicated through the conflict of emotions these signs elicit: as we feel relief or civic pride over a (seemingly) long period of time without a traffic death (or local hate crime), we are at the same time reminded of an unpleasant truth, in this case the knowledge that the denial of basic civil and human rights exists right here and vicious acts of destruction are perpetrated close to home. When the day-count numbers are low, this realization may be most powerful. Awareness of this issue, as with all social maladies, can be the first stage of a fundamentally decent population affecting positive social change within its community.

A brief list of hate crimes in Georgia as reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Lawrenceville, Published on 08-28-2005. Swastikas and obscenities were burned into the lawn of a Jewish family's home.

Covington, Published on 03-24-2005. Racial slurs and swastikas were spray painted on a black man's truck. The windows were smashed and the tires were also slashed.

Statesboro, Published on 11-06-2004. Anti-gay epithets were spray-painted on a gay student's car at Georgia Southern University.  

Athens, Published on 09-13-2004. Swastikas and a racial epithet were spray- painted on a black family's home.  

Tucker, Published on 05-20-2004. Racist graffiti was found on the running track at a high school.  

Trenton, Published on 05-07-2004. Six white men, Terrel Timothy Garner, Stacy Paul Jones, Steven Garland Jones, Jeremy Ray Sims, Eric Shane Sullivan and Billy Richard Wells, pleaded guilty to a hate crime charge of conspiracy to deprive civil rights for burning a cross in the yard of a woman whose daughter has a biracial boyfriend.

Canton, Published Winter, 2004. Four white students from Cherokee High School abduct a Latino man who is then subjected to a 30-minute pummeling, leaving him bruised and blooded from his thighs to his neck.



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YARD SIGN 1

Digital Print on Tyvek, Wooden Stakes, 18" x 24", 2004

Yard Sign Project
Red, white and blue signs, approximately 1.5' x 2', are to be placed in front yards and other public locations. They are designed to resemble the ubiquitous yard signs* printed commercially and posted in front of homes and businesses throughout the southern USA. The "Ten Commandments" yard sign includes text from the Geneva Convention as it relates specifically to treatment of prisoners. "Support Our Troops" includes officially suppressed imagery of the remains of US servicemen and servicewomen. "Re-Elect" makes explicit the merging of secular and religious iconography implied by the rhetoric of our political leaders. "Home For Sale" includes an image of the American flag, violently out of focus.

If you would like to display these signs in your yard or elsewhere, click here to download a "10 Commandments" pdf file, here to download "Support Our Troops," here to download "Home For Sale," or here to download "Re-Elect," all suitable for printing. You will either need a large format printer, or you can resize the image for your printer. I ask that you send E-mail confirmation of your participation, and if possible, digital documentation of your sign in place to wwfisher@charter.net or william.fisher@gcsu.edu, or photographs may be mailed to Bill Fisher, CBX 094, GC&SU, Milledgeville, Georgia 31061. Please feel free to encourage others to participate.

Project Rationale

As our political leaders and media now focus on the outrage felt over the recent release of images of torture and humiliation of Iraqi Prisoners of War, it appears the "illegal" release of such images may be as repugnant as the actual abuses or their underlying causes.

This may be inferred from the following excerpted testimony by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld... Full Text of Yard Sign Project



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Re-Present: An international interactive studio collaboration
"Communicative action can be understood as a circular process in which the actor is two things in one: an initiator, who masters situations through actions for which he is accountable, and a product of the transitions surrounding him, of groups whose cohesion is based on solidarity to which he belongs, and of processes of socialization in which he is reared."-- Jurgen Habermas

"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." -- Paulo Freire

"There is no mystery to making history." -- Linton Kwesi Johnson

Since 9/11 there has been a pall in regards to creating a critical dialogue engaging free speech vs. homeland security. The media has assumed the role of public relations officer simply reflecting and reiterating our national foreign policy instead of fostering discourse. Any hint of criticism is nearly considered sedition. This proposal is meant to illustrate a process of redefining and a potential shifting of "traditional" avenues of information. We propose to use readily available technology to re-channel the direction of information from mega-corporate centralized mediated information capitols to a decentralized community-based series of networks. Our goals are to process and reprocess information as individuals that are members of separate communities and yet bound by technology, to democratize and amplify individual voices cross-culturally and globally. We have invited various artists to open their homes, studios, and/or institutions to the communities to which they respectively (and respectfully) belong, allowing members of the community access to technology. They will be assisted in articulating their own story through the digital media, while we at the Boston point of the network will be using both the digital and traditional printmaking process to foster our end of the dialogue.

During a 24-hour period between April 2 and April 5, 2003, an international network will be created for the electronic exchange of text and imagery...To encourage involvement from the widest possible community base, participants will be asked to consider, but are not limited to the conference host¹s list of proposed themes when choosing data for transmission. We believe the very act of participating in such a project is a political act, and we hope through the nature of this proposed "communicative action" to be exemplary of many of the conference themes, including:

The contemporary use of the print as political expression.

Revolution in the print idiom caused by new technologies.

The representation of remote constituencies.

How electronic representation conditions the making or communication of images.

The new history of multi-media and installation; the changing functions of space and image.

Full Text of Re-Present


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"Public Exhibition: Private Affections"

Monday January 21 is a National Holiday in honor and remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the great proponent of non-violence, tolerance and equality. In response to an incident of road rage we experienced recently in Milledgeville, the recent shootings at Martin Luther King Jr. High School, and other national and international Public Displays of Aggression, Ilse Padilla and Bill Fisher invite everyone to participate in a recurring action beginning this coming Monday. Every Monday between January 21 and April 29, 2002, at 12:05 pm, Padilla and Fisher will embrace and kiss in a public location. We ask all who would like to join us each or any Monday to please:

1. Embrace and/or kiss a willing accomplice for at least 3 seconds in a public location, maintaining the display as long as desired.

2. As this Monday is a national holiday, we will hold one another in the front yard of our home beginning at 12:05 pm. Following Mondays we will perform this act on the GC&SU campus, within the downtown area of Milledgeville, or wherever we find ourselves to be. All are encouraged to participate in a similar fashion at 12:05 pm.

3. Respond throughout the semester to william.fisher@gcsu.edu or ipadilla@gcsu.edu with the date, location, and length of time of your embrace. You may include your name in the email, or remain anonymous. At the end of the semester we'd like to compile and announce the statistics on participation. Names will not be used in this documentation.

Thanks to all, and to all who would like to join us in this simple, gentle act of connectedness, peace, and affirmation of the humane.

Hugs and kisses,

Ilse and Bill

XXXOOO

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