Saints: Objects of Devotion

Saints, Objects of Devotionis a series of images the kernel of which was found during a trip to Puglia.  In Lecce a few modern statues of saints installed in Baroque churches of butter yellow stone were photographed, surrounded by flowers, plants and sundry objects in various stages of decay. It was an unexpected and fortunate start to a project. 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 McKay’s time as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2020.

The finished works are digital collages made from raw material gathered rather quickly in the field.  Each picture takes about two minutes with a camera and perhaps twenty hours with a computer.  It is a process of deciding on an area of interest, reacting intuitively to new situations and then proceeding analytically to develop a coherent composition that fits in a visually broad but thematically consistent body of work.  Because the work is made in a computer it is impossible to know what might work and what won’t while shooting.

Each individual piece is comprised of several, three to eight, individual contiguous frames, shot digitally, hand held.  The goal while assembling the final image and print is to create an intriguing composition without trying to match each frame exactly. Seams are seen, intentionally.  The effect of this incorporates both repetitions and voids, encouraging the eye to flow between frames then return in an attempt to figure out, “What IS this?”

The Saints images are both individual shrines and architectural interiors shot as vertical panoramas, which is odd.  As a result of the multi-frame process they have distinctive, flattened, distorted perspective.  Because they are shot in a 150 to 250 degree arc, the view frequently moves across the light, perhaps fore-lit and backlit in different areas of the same piece.  Color and tone matching are integral to making the compositions flow.

The finished prints are large, from 48” to 85” (120 to 210 cm) high, archival pigment prints. 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.

The intention is to lure the viewer into lingering and considering more intently the nature of the scene depicted.  The goal is not to create an alternate reality but 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 spiritual contemplation and solace; a place where worldly concerns are suspended; where the observant look both forward and back.  Where time stops.

-Wit McKay