Photographs display subjective nature of the sacred
By Anna Baldasty
What makes a place sacred? Must it be explicitly sanctified by a religious community? Or can sacredness mean anything that propels the observer beyond individual human experience?
The de Saisset Museum's latest exhibition, "Faith Placed: The Intersection of Spirituality and Location in Contemporary Photography," explores these questions through the artwork of modern photographers, most of whom live in the Bay Area.
The exhibit, which opened Jan. 13 and runs through Mar. 4, displays the work of artists whose photographic images make fluid and provocative the term "sacred."
And yet, despite the common unifying theme of the collection, the 17 featured artists contemplate the nature of worship, pilgrimage and memorial from surprisingly diverse creative lenses.
Drawing as their subject matter religious sites and structures, claimed by a wide variety of faiths, the artists express both the aesthetic beauty as well as the symbolic potential of religious architecture.
Not all the featured artists are content to evaluate "sacred" in purely traditional terms.
Although many of the photographs showcase religious buildings representing the contemporary world's best-known and most widely distributed religions, such as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam, others offer examples of a spirituality of place not defined by ties to any organized system of belief.
The photographs of Brian Taylor, for example, evoke the quieter, personal sensation of sacredness found in the still beauty of nature.
One of his most arresting pieces captures a lone tree, its root system partially exposed by erosion.
Other artists like Laurie Long treat the concept of sacred space more lightheartedly. Combining elements of humor, feminism and pop culture in her art, Long photographs places in Europe where female deities were worshipped thousands of years ago.
She later reformats the images in the style of travel postcards, which has the effect of denying the work's solemnity, yet without withdrawing respect of the artistic work and reducing it to parody.
But perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the exhibit is that it does not let artists like Long and Taylor do all the defining.
Rather, a downstairs community gallery invites visitors to send in pictures of places they personally consider sacred.
The community gallery returns the question of sacredness to the viewer, inviting a dialogue of reaction and reply between museum-goer and artist that fosters a more all-encompassing understanding of faith.
"Religious tolerance is one of the biggest issues confronting contemporary society," said Karen Kienzle, curator of the exhibit. According to Kienzle, in making fluid the idea of sacredness, the exhibit "reinforces the Santa Clara emphasis on seeing God in all things."
This helps explain Santa Clara religious studies professor Philip Boo Riley's choice to incorporate the exhibit into the curriculum of his Ways of Understanding Religion class, which is working with some of the local artists in a three-part lecture series.
It is an exhibit of discussion more than description, and perhaps no question that it raises matters more than its interrogation of what sacred means to modern society.
Is introspection, essential for giving "sacredness" leisure to mature, threatened by our society's relentless 24/7 pace? Perhaps not, the images say. They belong to anyone who takes a quiet moment for their contemplation.
Contact Anna Baldasty at abaldasty@scu.edu.