I see You.

A Picture About God

This project focused on the way we perceive God.
The questions that arose were...

How do you picture God?

(Is God male or female? What color is God?)

Should you picture God?

 I grew up in a Christian community and learned about God through the Sunday school way. I visualized though pictures of Jesus as human(like the one below), perceived God as a beam of light and the Holy Spirit as a burning fire. This is how I was taught, and inevitably it was how I pictured God. However, thinking about the question "should you picture God?", I wondered about the morality and rationality behind it.
How is it not right? I have been doing this since I was little and I had no clue what else to do. But what hit me the most was the fact that I had minimal information. I had no idea how big God was and I have been putting him into a small box (or frame in this case) this entire time.
It is not that we should or shouldn't picture God. The truth is that when we picture God, we need to keep in mind that what we are picturing is an aspect of God and not God Himself as a whole.

This photo I took, I believe, accurately portrayed how "I see God." It is always through an object or a reflection of something else. I have yet to succeed in perceiving God as He truly is, because He is too great for me to understand. But as I strive, I grab that mirror, and I look through the window, in hopes of one day seeing God as great as He actually is...

On a much more technical note, we talked a lot about Catacombs and Churches during class period. We focused on how they were built and designed, and also how there were thought out. And because of such structure we were able to see how they perceived God when the such buildings were built.

The Churches that had a tendency to catch my eye were mostly those that had an interesting construction. Rather than the significance of what colors they use, and how they painted the figures onto the walls, the structure spoke in an interesting way, representing how the people perceived God back in the day. 
Many Historical Orthodox Churches have a structure where there is a dome that has a painting of Jesus. At the same time this represents the Christ being high up, it also portrays the meaning of seeing God the father through the son Jesus. When you look up into the dome where Jesus is placed, you are also looking up to the almighty Father through Him.

Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6)

KODAMA [木霊]

Earth Works

 

A group project with Rachel Steeves, Kaija Nivala, Anna Ploegman, and Spencer Hees.

(The Earth Works Project was a group project where we paired with one person from class, and 2-3 people from Creativity and Design class.)

Earthworks are engineering works created through the moving or processing of parts of the earth's surface involving quantities of soil or unformed rock. The earth may be moved to another location and formed into a desired shape for a purpose. Wikipedia

For the Project we needed to come up with multiple ideas and contain it into one series.

I was particularly in charge of the Myth/Folk Tale that we needed to come up with, and taking photos/videos on our filed trip day. The photos and videos were referenced by the beginning of the Folk Tale. The idea of the Samurai being a tree and how it is human yet also a spirit especially influenced me. 

Myth/Folk tale: The Tale of the Cedar Tree and His Wife

Long ago in ancient Japan, there lived a fine young servant girl who was hired by a family to babysit their child. This girl eventually befriends a kind samurai (a Japanese soldier). However, no one has even heard or seen this young samurai before. He always came at night to the girls house, and left soon before the sun rises for the morning. No matter how many times the girl asked him what his name was and where he came from, the samurai kept quiet. One night the girl decided to tie a small thread around a needle and stick it into the hem of the samurai’s cloths. After the sun rose she followed the string to see where it would lead her in hopes of figuring out where this samurai was. When she came to the end of the string she spots a giant cedar tree with a needle stuck in the bottom of it. She soon realized that the lovely samurai was the cedar tree all along. Even after finding out that, she was not afraid, for she knew he was a kind spirit. She married the tree spirit and was blessed with children.

Tragedy strikes short after, the giant tree is determined to be too large and is decided among the towns men to be cut down and made into a bridge. Many Lumberjacks were gathered and tried to cut the big cedar down. But no matter how far in they cut, the cedar is completely back to normal the next day. A wise man comes along and tells the townspeople to burn small chips off the cedar. The cedar eventually falls, but when they try to drag it back into town the cedar kept moving back to where it originally was. The townspeople did not know what to do, so they told the cedar’s wife to deal with it. Despite all the sadness she bared for her husband, she put her hand on the cedar and asked “Please will you go into the town,” and at that moment the people had no problem dragging the cedar back into town. The cedar was broken down by the people and made into a bridge. However, night after night the cedar spirit haunted the bridge, and people were too afraid to cross. The wife was called in again and to calm her husband’s spirit she recited a poem, “hems burned, gone to town, a bridge be crossed with flow in the cedar’s swaddling cloths.” and after this the bridge became peaceful and people were able to cross. However, people feared the children of the cedar and wife, for they were part spirit/tree and human, so they took them and murdered them. The wife spends the rest of her life in tears… (the end)

"Humanity has always been intrinsically connected with nature. We are limited by its laws and commanded to subdue and rule over it. In some ways, we are born of it. As a photography and design group, we are going to focus on this link and explore this concept of birth from nature. To accomplish this, we will use meaningful alterations, sculptural forms, and figure in the landscape (explained in more detail below)" -Rachel (group partner)

Other than the Myth/Folk Take, we referenced a lot of a reading we did in class “The Earth as Art.” In the reading there is a discussion about how artist attempt to restore nature and create art that not only states a point/theme but also to create in order to bring about change. Our proposal included the basic ideas of the Myth/Folk Tale (despite the fact that we did not play out the entire story in the project) and the idea of mending the broken earth. We liked the idea of attempting to mend nature, especially as we were unsuccessful in actually accomplishing any sort of healing. 
Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison’s piece below inspired the idea of attempting to mend the earth.

Consumed

 The Spectacle

In class we talked about the spectacle... for quite a while actually.
 We watched the movie Rear Window in class. It was really interesting to think that we place our own views onto others and expect that to be the reality. like so, I really liked thinking about the concept that people tend to think that we are not something when we are and vise-versa.

I photo shopped most of them and others I pulled from other artists who were inspired by Kruger and those done by Kruger herself. this project was a very smooth process for me.

 

Inspired by Barbara Kruger:
I was obviously inspired a lot by Barbara Kruger. The way she tackles how she views the world and what it has become prompted me to take on my own spin on it. Consumerism is what I mainly attempted to focus on. A lot of people progress with the technology and improvements of the world. And most of the time we think nothing of it. Because we are part of it and sometimes we lose ourselves in it.


Walter Brueggemann's 19 Theses:

1.        Everybody lives by a script. The script may be implicit or explicit. It may be recognised or unrecognised, but everybody has a script.

2.        We get scripted. All of us get scripted through the process of nurture and formation and socialisation, and it happens to us without our knowing it.

3.         The dominant scripting in our society is a script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism that socialises us all, liberal and conservative.

4.        That script (technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism) enacted through advertising and propaganda and ideology, especially on the liturgies of television, promises to make us safe and to make us happy.

5.        That script has failed. That script of military consumerism cannot make us safe and it cannot make us happy. We may be the unhappiest society in the world.

6.        Health for our society depends upon disengagement from and relinquishment of that script of military consumerism. This is a disengagement and relinquishment that we mostly resist and about which we are profoundly ambiguous.

7.        It is the task of ministry to de-script that script among us. That is, to enable persons to relinquish a world that no longer exists and indeed never did exist.

8.        The task of descripting, relinquishment and disengagement is accomplished by a steady, patient, intentional articulation of an alternative script that we say can make us happy and make us safe.

9.        The alternative script is rooted in the Bible and is enacted through the tradition of the Church. It is an offer of a counter-narrative, counter to the script of technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism.

10.    That alternative script has as its most distinctive feature – its key character – the God of the Bible whom we name as Father, Son, and Spirit.

11.    That script is not monolithic, one dimensional or seamless. It is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent. Partly it is ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because it has been crafted over time by many committees. But it is also ragged and disjunctive and incoherent because the key character is illusive and irascible in freedom and in sovereignty and in hiddenness, and, I’m embarrassed to say, in violence – [a] huge problem for us.

12.    The ragged, disjunctive, and incoherent quality of the counter-script to which we testify cannot be smoothed or made seamless because when we do that the script gets flattened and domesticated and it becomes a weak echo of the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism. Whereas the dominant script of technological, consumer militarism is all about certitude, privilege, and entitlement this counter-script is not about certitude, privilege, and entitlement. Thus care must be taken to let this script be what it is, which entails letting God be God’s irascible self.

13.    The ragged, disjunctive character of the counter-script to which we testify invites its adherents to quarrel among themselves – liberals and conservatives – in ways that detract from the main claims of the script and so to debilitate the focus of the script.

14.    The entry point into the counter-script is baptism. Whereby we say in the old liturgies, “do you renounce the dominant script?”

15.    The nurture, formation, and socialisation into the counter-script with this illusive, irascible character is the work of ministry. We do that work of nurture, formation, and socialisation by the practices of preaching, liturgy, education, social action, spirituality, and neighbouring of all kinds.

16.    Most of us are ambiguous about the script; those with whom we minister and I dare say, those of us who minister. Most of us are not at the deepest places wanting to choose between the dominant script and the counter-script. Most of us in the deep places are vacillating and mumbling in ambivalence.

17.    This ambivalence between scripts is precisely the primary venue for the Spirit, so that ministry is to name and enhance the ambivalence that liberals and conservatives have in common that puts people in crisis and consequently that invokes resistance and hostility.

18.    Ministry is to manage that ambivalence that is crucially present among liberals and conservatives in generative faithful ways in order to permit relinquishment of [the] old script and embrace of the new script.

19.    The work of ministry is crucial and pivotal and indispensable in our society precisely because there is no one except the church and the synagogue to name and evoke the ambivalence and to manage a way through it. I think often I see the mundane day-to-day stuff ministers have to do and I think, my God, what would happen if you took all the ministers out. The role of ministry then is as urgent as it is wondrous and difficult.

society/culture/etc. is pulling us away from scripture and covenant.
just like consumerism, we do not realize that every time we consume something we are also being consumed by the object as well.