EpiscoDisco

Saturday, October 31st, 2009 || 6PM to 9PM || Grace Cathedral

Paradise Now presents “What You Are I Once Was”

In this group exhibition honoring the traditions of Dia de Los Muertos and All Souls Day, Bay Area artists Bert Bergen, Hilary Pecis,  Meagan Donegan and Veronica Majano from Mission Media Archives raise altars for one night to rejoice life and honor the departed in this sublime setting. This month we asked all attendees to bring an altar object (photo, flower, note, curio) to collaborate in our artistic commemoration of what is lost while exulting the here and now. Brooklyn-based artist Dan Carlson’s supernatural video work offered a stolen a glimpse of what lies between these realms, and a musical procession led by Zak Shepard trumpeted our effort to reach resonances of the earthly and beyond.

Dan Carlson, Procession, digital video, 2009

Procession is a looped digital video installation created specifically for “What You Are I Once Was” at Grace Cathedral. Inspired by various cultural interpretations of the funeral ceremony, religious costume and candlelight are replaced with a suit covered in high frequency LED lights to simultaneously engage issues of artificiality, spirituality and presence in religious ritual.

Perhaps we are stealing a glimpse of a crossing-over or a ritualistic procession of the supernatural, or witnessing the endless ramble of a lost being. Temporarily trapped inside a tube TV, these images speak to our natural tendencies to put a human form on the idea of the spirit in an attempt to identify with the realms of the metaphysical.

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Originally from Providence, RI, Dan Carlson is a Brooklyn-based mixed media artist and a 2010 MFA Fine Arts candidate at Parsons New School of Design.  Exhibiting his work in venues such as the Artist’s Space, NY and the MassMOCA, Carlson constructs sculptural installations utilizing photography and video to bring heightened attention to the materiality of high and low technology.

Hilary Pecis, Alveterzane American Fork Citizen, mixed media, 2009

Horrifying for some and shrug-worthy for others, the numbers show newspaper circulation falling at an accelerated rate and readership at historic lows. “Newspaper circulation now is lower than the 41.1 million papers sold in 1940, the earliest date for which records are published,” Alan Mutter of the Audit Bureau of Control recently wrote. We know, Alan, we know. So perhaps it’s time to let go.

This altar pays homage to the printed newspaper, and acknowledges its slow but eminent death. With the digitizing of news, the surplus of free media and the millions of individual publications, smudges of ink on our fingers may soon become a nostalgic memory. But after a good 318-year run, we are undeniably amidst a reinvention of journalism and the architecture of our information sharing, and here we take pause to celebrate the endless, ongoing cycle of life and death. Much love those who passed on in 2009.

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Hilary Pecis is a San Francisco-based, mixed media artist who creates geographic landscapes of ancient spaciousness through collage of meticulously cut paper. Pecis received her MFA from CCA in 2007, and her work has exhibited nationally and abroad at galleries including Triple Base, Catherine Clark and White Columns, as well as graced the pages of Art Ltd, New American Paintings, the San Francisco Chronicle, and NY Art Magazine.

Bert Bergen, In the Shadow of the 4th Way, mixed media, 2009

As the focal point in a personal altar, the photo of a loved one that has passed becomes a visual document of a life that impacted another being with prolonged effect.  As time progresses and this document fades and yellows, the memories of the lost loved-ones are enhanced with emotions that human memory seems hard-wired to bestow.

But what if this document is memorializing a loved-one you never knew? The centerpiece of this altar is the photo of Robert D. Ford – a framed photograph that was liberated one night from the St. Francis Yacht Club and went on to grace the artist’s living room walls for 12 years: “All of this time visitors and friends would ask me who this man was.  Tinged with humor my responses varied, but always involved the elaborate exploits of my sea loving relative that wore his yachtsman’s hat and revolved around the horror and awe I feel for the universe of the ocean and the creatures in it.”
Mystical images of the aquatic world provide the backdrop for the memorialization of these fabrications that have intertwined with the artist’s reality.  Through cutouts of sea creatures, flaming humans, and severed limbs, displayed with some traditional components of a Day of the Dead altar (there is a cross, bowls of bread and fruit, salt and votive candles) this piece utilizes the familiar arena of experience to introduce new iconography from other narratives of ecstatic experiences.

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Bert Bergen was born on Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound of Washington State, and is currently a San Francisco-based artist whose installation, sculptural and two-dimensional work has been featured nationally in both solo and group exhibitions since 2003. Bergen’s distinct and recognizable hand has left indelible impressions at Bay Area galleries such as Triple Base, the Lab, and more recently SFMOMA’s ‘Windows Program’. In addition to being an accomplished musician, Bergen’s visual mediums have ranged from screen-printing, wheat pasting, drawing, painting, sculpture, sewing and ritualistic performances.

Meagan Donegan, Oh Happy Day, mixed media, 2009

According to Celtic lore, this is the time of the calendar year when boundaries between the world of the living and the world of the dead become thinner, allowing spirits and other supernatural entities to pass between the worlds to commune with us humans. With the honoring of ancestors and other departed souls, comes the opportunity to explore what new forms our kinship with the departed take.
Artist Meagan Donegan builds this intimately personal altar in honor of her father, Robert Wiluki. Fifty-six painted marigolds represent every year he was loved while in the physical form. Drawing on his work as a luthier, a guitar and an artist’s easel become the symbols that commemorate this father and daughter’s bond. The artist explains that the words “Oh Happy Day” carved into the wood of the guitar coax her consciousness to the present, and serve as a reminder to celebrate their connection that still persists.

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Meagan Donegan is a twin, and uses her artwork to process the emotional implications of that and other relationships. The connection she has with her sibling transcends physiological explanations, and has compelled her to explore the universal idea of human connection beyond the genealogical. Meagan is also a Bay Area-based artist, focused primarily on the illustrative.

Paradise Now

Theology, music and art all share the aspiration to transcend the borders that language cannot. Paradise Now is a nondenominational curatorial duo that is exploring this commonality by showcasing artists who engage the awe-inspiring space within Grace Cathedral through multi-media installations and performing arts. Paradise Now is Eve Ekman and Jean Cooney.

Grace Cathedral

“Great buildings are outward expressions of the human spirit…which speak to the human urge to transcend the mundane and commune with the divine.” A San Francisco landmark, Grace Cathedral is also home to a spiritual community that has continuously enjoyed relationships with contemporary artists, most notably Ansel Adams and more recently Keith Haring, and opens its doors to new connections with Bay Area Artists though the Reverend Bertie Pearson and Paradise Now. These alliances are also congruous with the philosophies of Grace to “embrace innovation and open-minded conversation where inclusion is expected and people of all faiths are welcomed.”