Protest for the Sublime

This project started while in residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program (LMCC). Working on a chakra painting on wood, I felt unstatisfied with the finished panel, and felt it was too constrained. I decided to experiment, and complete the figure's halo on a piece of cardboard that would be placed behind the painting. As I was using a different base, I changed the paint too, and used some gold pigment I had lying around. The resulting painting struck me very strongly, and I started making more "haloes" on cardboard. Mounting the paintings onto sticks made them a bit remote, and highlighted the luminous quality of the paint.

As I was writing and thinking about this project, I kept coming back to the ideas of prayer anad protest, and how they are both strategies for dealing with the world. Activism offers a way to create a better world in the present, while meditation and devotion seek to find peace and transcendence within the world as it exists. I was invited to show this project at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in the fall of 2009, and the church provided the perfect context for this absurd existential protest waiting to happen.

The paintings themselves are all circular patterns, referencing haloes, mandalas, coronas and other mystical iconography. As I continue to make more of them, I am drawing on even more disciplines, including science, path and politics. This wall of newer paintings uses imagery from Buckminster Fuller, fractals, alchemy, the Masons, and Union seals, as well as the walking labyrinth from Chartes Cathedral.

For some time, I have been wanting to explore performance with these signs. A perfect opportunity represented itself when Nina Morrison, a playwright who was in residence with me at the LMCC residency, wanted to collaborate on an upcoming work, Girl Adventures Parts 1-4. A fantastical story of a woman trying to reconnect with her matrilineal heritage, the play includes a girl gang of sea goddesses who have never left the sanctity of their communal wombspace. In the grand finale, the thuggesses say goodbye to their visitor with some fanfare, and with a dozen of these signs. Made especially to respond to the themes of the play, the paintings draw upon various pagan imagery, including the ouroborous, moon cycles, the celtic tree of life, and japanese crests.