You Gotta Have Faith

The human relationship with religion and spirituality is a many varied thing. Just about every faith in history has found its form in art: from the Lascaux caves to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Religious paintings might seem a fusty old concept, but a generation of artists are investigating new forms of faith, folding it into work that is both expansive and inclusive.

The Richmond Art Gallery delves deeply into this rich trove of ideas in a new exhibition. It Begins with Knowing and Not Knowing is curated by Zoë Chan and addresses some of our most profound existential questions through the work of seven artists, each contending with the mysteries of existence. The explorations of spirituality combine ceremony, ritual, symbology and liturgies of all sorts.

Artist Zoë Kreye’s gold lamé entranceway provides a suitable introduction. If you equate lamé fabric with Cher’s outfits, Las Vegas reviews and Liberace’s entire ethos, you’re not wrong. But Kreye approaches this most flamboyant of materials with a different intent, constructing a physical portal to the exhibition, a roughly-hewn archway created by the artist standing on tiptoe and cutting the fabric by following the natural curve through space created by the movement of her arm.

It’s a suitably warm, very human introduction, helped along by a hand-painted sign that lists the names of the artists and the title of the show on another, even more glorious fabric, a soft-pink chiffon that moves and ripples with even the slightest current of air.

Fabric plays a large role in the show as a transitional material. Clothing has always occupied a central role in faith. Think cardinal red and papal-white robes, and the colours and textures of different religious vestments.

Pink taffeta billows forth in the work of Ximena Velázquez's video installation. Framed by two giant swoops of shiny pink fabric that recalls a quinceanera dress, the artist is depicted in the act of making and cooking tortillas.

Tethered by her long braids to the frame of the installation, she works steadily, rolling out the dough, shaping it and cooking into a puffed shape. The level of care is immediate, deliberate, and almost offsets the sense of being caught and confined. The ties between family, culture, history and religion are intimated. But there are other things at work as well.

Velázquez is queer, and “tortilla-maker” in Spanish is a derogatory slang term for a gay woman in Mexico. In her artist’s statement, Velázquez explains “This piece is an internal conversation that crosses the many nuances that shape me: migration, transgenerational trauma, queerness, longing and belonging, gender roles, performativity and creation.”

The recipes, handed down from Velázquez’s great-grandmother, recall Catholic rites, but the bodily connection in making and sharing food is even more ancient than organized religion. Anyone who has ever used a mixing bowl that their grandparent or great-grandparent also put to good use understands this direct line to familial history.

Connecting the everyday with the divine

The connection between the domestic chores of everyday life and the bigger questions of identity, are similarly addressed in the work of artist Rebecca Bair. Using cyanotypes, an ancient form of photographic printing that utilizes ultraviolet and blue light to create images, Bair transforms the quotidian act of washing her hair into a ritual of identity, dignity and self-care.

Imprints of the artist’s hair are featured on a series of fabric-covered monoliths, almost Kubrickian in their presence and power. These majestic shapes, coloured a deep royal blue, are so self-possessed, they’re almost intimidating.

In the curious interplay between the humble stuff of hair and the bigger questions of being human, all kinds of things emerge. In the midst of this ping-pong experience from big to small, grand to intimate, there’s a possibility for viewers to find themselves and understand themselves in a new way.

Humble domestic acts transformed into a spiritual work is also at the heart of the work of Xinwei Che 車昕蔚. Time as a medium of existence is rendered manifest in the clay vessels, none of which serve an obvious or practical function. These are not vessels to hold things, but to let them go.

A series of photographic images, arranged on the floor in a grid, use Chinese herbal medicine to create otherworldly images. Recalling natural forms, they are extremely beautiful, the saturated colour leaching out in expansive penumbras and coronas like so many small planetary bodies.

The intent of the work is to allow the process of time to be made visible so that viewers can step outside of the frantic pace of contemporary life and inhabit a different temporal space. Xinwei Che calls this process being “in time.”

In this aspect, the experience of taking in Che’s work feels a little like stepping into a church or another sanctified space.

Time falls away. For a while, you can simply be. The relief of this is enormous.

Shouts of joy, and resistance

A different kind of time is at the heart of Patrick Cruz’s joyful paintings. Chagall-like in their unbridled pleasure of movement, community and culture, Cruz’s dense and layered work employs a form of collage, marrying figurative images with found materials.

Arcane but still possessed of innate charm, some of the images were derived from the artist’s experimentations with past-life regression techniques, described variously as: “meditation, divination and hypnosis as research methodologies to exhume and retrieve hidden knowledge.”

From these journeys, Cruz has brought back a shout of joy, ringing loud with colour and humour.

The harder, harsher aspects of traditional faith are referenced in the film installation of artist Ogheneofegor Obuwoma's. In Memory of Who We Were combines food and faith into an unsettling whole. In one scene, a character called White Deity is seen trying to eat with a lace shroud covering her head.

Even as she attempts to get the food into her mouth, the veil that covers her face precludes anything getting in. It’s a disconcerting exercise that references emptiness, starvation even.

Obuwoma’s experience at a Catholic boarding school forms the meat of the work, as explained in the artist’s statement: “This is a film about remembering and also forgetting.... This film is an act of resistance to institutional and church violence and the silence expected of those who live through it.”

Reimagining our world

A similar reworking emerges in the work of Cree and Métis artist Michelle Sound, who blends archival photos, beadwork, porcupine quills and caribou fur puffs into family history.

"Holding It Together" sews back together a ragged, difficult past, healing the edges of generational wounds handed down from parents to children. Sound says “my work highlights that acts of care and joy are situated in family and community.”

In a photographic series entitled "Every Photo I Have of My Mother," Sound’s mother Theresa is depicted from girlhood to adulthood. The photos, stretched across a collection of elk hide drums, are mounted on the wall in circular format. The silent instruments afford a safe space where love and grief can take place.

The pain, pleasure and struggle of being a corporeal being at the heart of this collection of work followed me long after the experience of the show itself.

Suddenly, even the most ordinary things took on a different quality.

Everything is holy: hair, clay, food and lamé. Especially lamé.

‘It Begins with Knowing and Not Knowing’ runs until Sept. 29 at the Richmond Art Gallery.