statement of inquiry – johnros.com

creative labor is inseparable from daily life.

the studio is a site of inquiry. the classroom is a site of production. the organizing meeting is a site of knowledge-making. art, inquiry, study, scholarship, making, thinking — the same activity, approached from different angles, sustained over time. i have been doing this since 1998. that duration is its own argument.

i use the word inquiry, and on purpose. linda tuhiwai smith writes that “the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to european imperialism and colonialism.” research extracts, catalogues, owns and credentials. it makes the researcher the one who knows and the community the one who is known. inquiry carries sustained attention without taking ownership.

my inquiry centers on labor, value and practice as lived conditions. labor is the organizing logic of daily life, the structure through which time, bodies and meaning are distributed and withheld. value emerges through relation, endurance and care. artistic practice is the method through which they are tested, complicated and kept alive. the medium running through all of it is continuity — the conditions under which relation, care and shared time persist outside the market and outside institutional recognition.

this inquiry operates from necessity, not hope. hope belongs to a grammar of later — a promise shaped by structures that have already failed. what keeps this work going is the pressure of the present: the need to care, to gather, to build small infrastructures of survival where none exist.

care is work. maintenance is method. showing up — again and again, without recognition or reward — is its own form of rigor. refusal is a practice of staying accountable within compromised structures while building something else alongside them.

what i am building is a body of work and a set of parallel structures: reading ecosystems, pedagogical frameworks, durational practices, community agreements, collective rituals — spaces where care is the operating logic and time moves differently. these are alternatives — fragile, underfunded, sometimes invisible, always ongoing.

my doctoral study follows these questions into places where artists already build otherwise — artist-run institutions, experimental pedagogies, grassroots infrastructures. i enter as a participant: listening, interviewing, working in the archive and in the studio. the study documents and theorizes practices that already exceed capitalist value regimes, and it belongs to a long line of artists who built livable structures where none existed.

theory is made — through repetition, gesture and the ordinary rituals of care and attention. practice is already epistemological. knowing happens in the studio, the classroom, the street, the meeting — wherever life insists on meaning.

continuity built outside the terms the institution recognizes.

this is a work-in-progress.
because transformation is not a theory — it is a practice.
and it is built, slowly, together, by people who show up.