INCARNATION SHOW 12/06 - 02/07

Looking at art can be like looking at television static and hoping to find the patterns…or it can be a potent medium that bypasses the mundane and gives us a glimpse of the transcendent, the mystical, the unspoken. It has the power to tell stories, connect us with feelings and memory, inspire us to wrestle with assumptions- revealing things that may not be easily seen otherwise.

The work displayed here comes from a growing community of artists who are a part of another community called the Vineyard Community Church. We wanted to find ways to talk about issues that impact us as artists that are also informed by our spirituality. Our hope is to peel back the surface and look into the mystery, the beauty of the story at the heart of the Christmas season. To go beneath the stereotypes, the Santa Claus outfits, the traditions, the mangers and Nativity scenes to look in to the very core…the idea of Incarnation.

The idea for this show comes from looking at the story of Christmas. It is such a thick soup of customs, tradition, stories and cultural currents. Very little remains of the origin- especially of the potent mystic quality in the notion of that story’s theme…the infinite becoming finite, that which exists outside of time entering a specific moment and location, that which is beyond measure incarnating into an inherently limited form. How similar this is to the same creative process it takes to paint paintings, craft words into poetry and assemble images into film.

Ideas churn inside the recesses of each of us until they manifest…are expressed in some concrete way as conversations, paintings, photographs, films and poems. These creations are a part of us, yet separate. They are representations of a process that is unseen and yet are also the real thing themselves.

Feel free to post any comments here as we would love to dialogue about this work.

Participating Artists:

Alyssa Beebe

Seth Deihl

Jordan Gadapee

Cory Hutchinson-Reuss

Ali Kirsch

Alicia Kock

Jason McCoy

Zakary Neumann

Scott Pardue

Luke Wassink