My Artist's Statement

(cross post from my inbetween blog)

Today marks the beginning of what some parts of the Christian church celebrate as the season of epiphany. I've been creating a video art installation for my church's celebration of epiphany (I'll blog about the process and include a video clip later), but here's the image on the cover of our liturgy books and my statement.



As I developed this epiphany installation, I tried to focus on two tensions/relationships.

The first tension is the relationship between Christmas and Epiphany. I’ve always been intrigued by the dialogue between these two church seasons which alternately focus upon:

the ARRIVAL of the Incarnation -- and -- the RECOGNITION of the Incarnation.

~both essential elements of our Christian Faith.


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The second tension is the disparity / relationship between:

seeing things -- and -- the emergence of Sight or Vision.

Cinema has always thrilled me because of its ability to provide Sight and Vision. The stories, the scale, the color, the projection, the mise en scene. Since the earliest movies I remember, cinema has always baptized my imagination and provided me with new eyes: a fresh VISION, a second SIGHT of my world.

Watching a movie includes all kinds of unconscious physiological and psychological labor. Our eyes need to limit their focus to a screen. Our brains must link disparate images together into a seamless flow. Our eyes and brains must together sort through a mish-mash of colors, tones, highlights and shadows, and distinguish between a constantly shifting figure and ground.


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I strain so hard to achieve Vision. I use my seeing to look up, but too often encounter the limits and fragmentation that prohibit me from catching Sight or Vision of the Hope I long for.


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For me, Epiphany occurs at the moment when Sight and Vision transcend all the limited and broken realities of seeing. Epiphany celebrates how even my broken perceptions of Incarnation can receive healing Light and reflect Hope-filled Vision.


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Epiphany Editing...

Here's what I wrote in my Two Sentence A Day Blog.

Spent most of the day editing the epiphany video, after a melt-down call to Michele, I decided to attack it again, so the kids (still enmeshed in Harry Potter) and I went back to Malone where they listened to the final battle between Harry and Voldemort and Dumbledore (not FINAL final -- remember, we're only in book five) and I continued to craft the "epiphany" moment in the video sequence.

By this time, I'm feeling okay about the actual images. I don't love them, and I wish I had invented another way to shoot the candle, but I also have started to like how the two seperate images interact with each other.

At this point, my panic is starting to focus on the difficulty of timing the whole thing to correspond with the service. How could I not have thought about the awkwardness of having ceilings scroll by during prayer and hymns? And those things are so improvisational!

After a long phone call with my brother in which I eliminate the possibility of mixing the two images live (like a DJ, cueing one than the other and fading it live), I decide that I'll try to make the best of having the images unfold in concert with the liturgy.

Gestation

Over coffee at Muggswigz, Michele and I talked about how we could work together to have our two liturgical seasons connect to one another.

She described the centerpiece of the advent art as including a descending globe made out of glass, with the burning Christcandle inside. The globe would descend throughout the season of Advent, until, at Christmas it would be at eye level -- God With Us.

My idea had been that the Epiphany video installation would center on an image that in some way signified Christ -- that would very slowly, very gradually become clearer throughout the course of the service.

I had been inspired by her description of the germ of her advent idea on Sunday when we chatted, and so had tried to combine the two ideas:

What if the image that gradually became clear was the candle descending in the globe.

As our coffee time progressed, we added the possibility of having the globe actually descend from the sky so that the blurry image would be beautiful even while it was blurry (a value that I always had about the idea was that the congregation would be looking at the screen for the first half of the service BOTH puzzled by it's hazy indistinctness AND quietly happy about how the indiscernible light looked beautiful).

Another idea that emerged during coffee came wholly out of our conversation, and since I had NONE of it going it, I suspect that Michele contributed more on this one, but... it was:

I had a concern that the video would be too front focused -- and not as inclusive or dialogical as much of the art in our church is.

So the idea emerged of having three banners hanging near the perimeters of where the congregation sits, all of which would be covered in mirror fragments.

During the scripture reading, we would invite a member of the congregation to go to these banners, which would be shrouded up to this point, and, while gazing at the clarifying screen image, remove the shroud.

In this version of our plan, the congregants would try to bring to mind an EPIPHANY that they had experienced in their lives as they removed the shrouds.

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.