Opening Reception Friday, February 26, 7-10 p.m. with an artist talk at 7:15, and a free concert by Dirt Poor Robins and Dave Moisan beginning at 8:00 p.m.  On view February 26 - April 25, 2010. 

‘Prayer and Wisdom’ is an art exhibit featuring two collaborative projects led by the Visual Arts Group of Sojourn Community Church. These projects grew out of a desire to respond visually to the rich texts found in the Bible. While the works resulting from these two projects differ greatly, they were grown from a common desire to work out the illumination of holy scriptures in our contemporary context.

The ‘Prayer’, or Psalms, portion of the exhibition features more than twenty large and small-scale installation projects conceived and created by Sojourn Visual Arts. Over the course of several months, a team of roughly fifteen visual artists spent time studying, discussing and reflecting on the heights and depths found in the book of Psalms. While recognizing both the enormous challenge of creating visual representations of the scriptures and the dizzying volume of the songs found in the ancient book, Sojourn Visual Arts used these discussions as a platform for creating the work found in the exhibit.

These works are at times simple, and at times complex. Reflecting the very nature of the Psalms themselves, the works occupy a visual space that is at once both literal and metaphoric. Feathered wings hanging from the ceiling cast a shadow inviting reflection on both celestial beings and the bone structure of nature’s aviators. A bed cloaked in astro-turf at once invites comfort and questions our modern attempts to harness and recreate nature’s ubiquitous forms. “Questioning Clocks” use simple icons to reflect universal questions constant from ancient minds to modern times.

As the Psalms were a response to God within the emotional and physical context of the original psalmists, the work here is also a response to God and a response to those ancient emotions captured by the psalmists’ verses. The Psalms often became a conversation between the fallen writer and his perfect, holy God. And so, recognizing the limitation of visual representation, these works are a conversation, a conversation about the scriptures, informed by the scriptures, toward the scriptures.

The ‘Wisdom’, or Proverbs portion of the exhibit features more than 100 illustrations of biblical proverbs.  Sojourn Visual Arts invited individual artists, classes, and churches around the country to explore the rich wisdom of the proverbs and respond by making images on 4×6 project panels. The entries are displayed together in the gallery to demonstrate the diversity of topics in proverbs and the diversity of responses to its wisdom. These illustrations were completed by children and adults.

All together, these two projects encouraged the dozens of collaborators who made this artwork to encounter the biblical texts in a creative, new way.

This page was posted Friday, January 22, 2010.