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...

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.