LG tags: Exhibit, Art, Icons, Saints, Liturgy
In an effort to help you know what to expect from each festival event and to decide which events you’ll most enjoy, we’ve created a Level Ground tagging system.
Religious saints are heroes of faith venerated for outstanding character traits and accomplishments. Gilded by the passage of time, they enter through myth into a liminal place between reality and possibility, in which their fantastic stories inspire and guide us mere mortals to ever stronger faith and ever better behavior here on earth. The historical church has identified certain humans whose stories are vital for fostering hope, while popular culture has its own pantheon of ‘saints.’
By bringing together religious and secular perspectives on what ‘makes’ a saint, this diverse grouping of immortalized individuals suggests the presence of the graceful, gracious sameness and difference that allows humans to sit in the grey together. Borrowing the words of poet Tamisha Tyler’s Let me walk with you, which inspired the promise that drives this installation: I will be here, with you, with everything that I am, to enjoy the mystery of everything that you are.
We have hoped to collect portraits of the saints of human life who have been recognized by the church, society, and individuals as outstanding in their sphere of influence, particularly as their stories may relate to tales of faith, gender, sexuality, and the myriad of struggles associated with them. These portraits, each illustrated in the artists’ own media and style, include symbolic imagery and are sometimes accompanied with the artists’ preferred devotional elements. They occupy the open courtyard space of Pasadena’s First United Methodist Church, which has been designed to invite embodied meditation and reflection. Taken together, this family album of saints comprises an interactive, liturgical installation that is meant to be as comforting as it is uncomfortable, as nostalgic as it is prophetic. (R.P.)