Saints: Objects of Devotion

Saints: Objects of Devotion is a series of images the kernel of which I found during a trip to Puglia.  In Lecce I photographed a few modern statues of saints installed in Baroque churches of butter yellow stone, surrounded by flowers, plants and sundry objects in various stages of decay.  The work was further developed in 2018 in Rome and at a fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, Italy. The project is ongoing, the focus of my time as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2020.

The Saints images are composed of both individual shrines and architectural interiors shot as vertical panoramas.  As a result of the multi-frame process, they have distinctive, flattened, distorted perspective.  I shoot them in a 150 to 250 degree arc therefore the view frequently moves across the light, perhaps fore-lit and backlit in different areas of the same piece. Scale is important to the experience of the work, as is highly saturated color.  This presentation harks back to the monumentality of most of the interiors and recapitulates the emotional, mystical, power imbued in the original subjects.  Like art, Christian saints both comfort and loom above us in their reverie, or torture, or both.

My intention is to lure the viewer into lingering and considering more intently the nature of the scene depicted.The point is not to recreate the known or create an alternate reality rather to reorient one that is familiar but perhaps not readily seen, to find meaning in the mundane.This is also the purpose of Saints as objects of devotion.The very definition of a person as a Saint is historically removed, mysterious, miraculous. Like art, each depiction of a saint is a locus for metaphysical contemplation and solace; a place where worldly concerns are suspended; whereobservers look both forward and back.Where time stops.

All images digital collage/archival pigment prints, various sizes, up to 60” high.