An Online Art Exhibition

As I was visiting the Wesley Theological Seminary website the other day, I came across a link to an online art exhibition on the “Image” Journal website.  I wish I had discovered it sooner, but was glad to experience it now, and wanted to share it with you.  It is an experience that one can approach by clicking on the artists’ submissions by weeks of the project, or by going to the various rooms / areas that the submissions represent.  I quote here the “Image” Journal description of the exhibition, which can be found too on the website for the exhibition  -  https://imagejournal.org/exhibitions-home-alone-together/ .

“Home Alone Together is both an exhibition and a journal.  Through the eyes of twenty-five artists around the world—from their 20s to their 90s—it explores the shared, bounded environment in which people across the world now live.

“Quarantine is quickly redefining and reconfiguring how people experience home.  It can be a space of refuge—representing safety from a nebulous, deadly threat—but also something of a pressure cooker.  We are all caught up in a strange experiment of uncertain duration.  Even those fortunate enough to escape direct loss and trauma are being forced to reckon with new realities—economic, emotional, spiritual—from the (dis)comfort of their own home.

“In this unsettled moment, artists can help draw our experience into focus.  Every week for the next three months, participating artists will contribute one photograph from a different room of their home.  Together, these photographs—whether taken in a kitchen or bedroom, the world outside the window, or even the virtual space of technology—will articulate a new, collective picture of home.

“We hope this project will create an opportunity to locate something of that quality Gaston Bachelard called “intimate immensity.”  What we see has become limited, but not how we see.  When the pandemic subsides and we re-enter the world, perhaps our way of seeing will have changed along with us.  Maybe we will be more prepared to encounter transcendence, even—perhaps especially—in the mundane.”

Co-Curators: S. Billie Mandle and Dr. Aaron Rosen

Project Manager: Taylor Curry

Director of Communications: Meaghan Ritchey, Image

Experiencing Works of Art

          It requires time, patience and discipline to engage with artistic expressions, three qualities that our hurry-and-get-it-done-now world neither appreciates nor encourages.  To walk past a painting and pretend that we have perceived it, is to deceive ourselves.  To watch a movie while talking with friends, unless we have seen the movie before, removes the depth of experience that the filmmaker is offering to us.  To look at pottery in a potter’s showroom, without carefully feeling the nuances of the form, is to miss the joy of the work and the connection with the act of creation.

            To receive the impact of a work of art, one must engage that work, and then integrate the response into one’s thoughts and meditations.  This is nothing less than the careful discipline that any other form of spiritual nourishment requires, in order to fully receive the gift that is offered in that moment.