Jacob’s Ladder: New art by Michael + Mickie Winters
On view September 10 - October 10, 2010.
Opening Reception Friday September 10, 7:00 - 10:00 p.m. with an artist talk beginning at 7:15 and a free concert by Brooks Ritter and Mike Mangione beginning at 8:00.
For the first time, after over three years of putting together exhibits of other people’s artwork at the 930, Gallery Director Michael Winters, together with his wife Mickie Winters, will share their own exhibit.
Artists’ Statement
“The great masters of the imagination do not make things up out of thin air; they direct our attention to what is right before our eyes. They then train us to see it whole - not in fragments but in context, with all the connections. They connect the visible and the invisible, the this with the that. They assist us in seeing what is around us all the time but which we regularly overlook. With their help we see it not as commonplace but as awesome, not as banal but as wondrous. For this reason, the imagination is one of the essential ministries in nurturing the life of faith. For faith is not a leap out of the everyday but a plunge into its depths.” - Eugene Peterson
We make it our job to see things as if seeing them for the first time. It’s a hard job because it can’t be forced. Renewed vision is a gift, like a pleasant dream. You didn’t ask for it and you can’t control it, but it changes the way you wake up. Startled and adjusting, you find yourself awake and in the light confusion of wonder.
In the biblical story known as Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob is on a multi-day journey through the desert and when he lays down to sleep he has a dream of a ladder “resting on the earth, with its top reaching heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the Lord…”
The dream caused such a strong impression that Jacob concluded that God was present there with him in the desert. “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” The dream gave him a vivid vision of heaven and angels and God - but more importantly in some ways, the dream provided him with renewed vision for the earth and the physical realm of reality where he lived his daily life. He says, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” He was referring to the physical place where he stood. He had been using a rock as a pillow. He set up the rock in the dirt as a monument.
We like this story because it runs parallel to the experience of our art making. Like receiving a good dream, we sometimes are gifted with the ability to see the world around us become unusually radiant. The writer Annie Dillard even uses the word “transfiguration” and describes her experience of this phenomenon: “It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power.”
When things light up this way, when our vision is renewed, we become aware that we were previously not seeing everything that was there before. We were blind to something that we now have our eyes glued to. Something has been revealed and it energizes us.
In this revelation of the visible, something invisible happens. Our sense of wonder is enlarged. The visible realm has an effect in the realm of the invisible, and the invisible realm is embedded in the physical realm. The visible and invisible, the spiritual and the physical, are overlapping realities. They’re all bound up together.
With these pictures we’re simply trying to put ourselves in a position where we might be gifted a heightened ability to see, and then we’re using photography to make a record of that to share with you.
