Photos of the Sanctuary

Here's the mirror at the back of the sanctuary. The mirror faces the screen like most of the congregation, so the idea that it is a symbol of our perception, hopefully occurs to congregants as they all file past the mirrors on the way out.



This view allows you to see the relative distance from the mirror to the front (where I was standing when I took the picture).



Here's the image I created by exporting a still from the film, before it achieved clarity (or before we have an epiphany) and then composited a shot of the mirror on it's side.



Here's how it looked on the liturgy covers.



And here's liturgy books spread across a pew.



Michele created the fabric transfer and sewed it to the altar cloth (two photos, here, one that contextualizes the altar with the baptismal font and the Christcandle):




I loved the slight modification Michele made to create the stohl Harry wears. You can see that she centered the flame and then extended the shattered lines in a way that emphasizes the arrival of light...

Advent Art

This wide shot shows a bit of how dramatic the scope of Michele's Advent vision was. These swaths of fabric eminated from the balcony, the windows and the front of the auditorium:



The place where the fabric came together opened almost like the inverted petals of a huge flower -- or the place where the sky opened to allow something to descend.



If you sat near the middle and front, you could see the glass globe and with the candle inside more clearly, and some felt a little trepidation that it could arrive with a vengeance and come crashing down on their heads.



Later in the advent season, the globe emerged from the fabric and hovered in mid air, just above the altar:

Influenced by Jonny...

Just after I discovered the blogosphere, I happened upon JonnyBaker's blog.

I was intrigued because the Ph.D. he was just finishing (had just finished) dovetailed with my own in several interesting ways:

we were both interested in popular culture performances,

we were both interested in the rhetorical dimension of these performances,

we were both making connections between ritual theory, performance theory and (me more than him) rhetorical theory.

Jonny was also clearly someone devoted to Christianity, keenly committed to the arts, and very interested in building genuine community in cutting edge ways. All these factors made me really interested in his blog.

I had done a gig as a "worship pastor" (many years ago) but was completely turned off by the formal disconnect between the artistic ghetto that my particular branch of Christianity had become. I spent a while at two conservative evangelical churches, trying to translate some cultural forms into the worship, but the interest level was nominal -- certainly not a priority, so I decided to focus my life energy and artistic interests elsewhere. (Obviously that story could be written in a much longer way, but it's a bit off track for this blog.)

It was, though, this vested interested in the the forms of church worship and their (dis/)connect to/from cultural forms in the cultural spheres that surround churches that really generated a lot of interest in reading Jonny's Tricks section.

He's been chronicling for years the formal devices used by artists and worship leaders to articulate meaningful and fresh expressions of worship.

Viewing Viola's art through this context, encouraged me to think about how something LIKE this might be used in a liturgical art setting.