All the
way to heaven is heaven.
—Saint Catherine of Siena
One of the
hallmarks of the visual artist is simply the ability to see. Art is
that act of seeing captured, translated, and shared. The image,
therefore, is a moment of time. It is what the artist saw, either in
direct experience of the external world, or, indirect experience of
the inner landscape of imagination.
What we
see is what we shape. And this process of seeing is both constant
and subtle. Why? Because what we see is common. Our visual landscape
is the everyday, the ordinary, the instant. We see light and shadow,
form and substance, objects and creatures. In short, we see life.
Life lived in ordinary time. Life all around us—the created reality
of the artist of origin that we name God.
In this
exhibition we will attempt to inspire through a celebration of the
ordinary. We will seek to reveal what we see at its most fundamental
level. We will freeze-frame the process of art so that we may consider
its inner workings—those fragments of time that give meaning to what
we see, and give depth to what we perceive.
...the most
basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to
life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer,
deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever
occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on
automatic pilot. In a world
that for the most part steers clear of
the whole idea of
holiness, art is one of the few places left where
we
can speak to each other of holy things.
— Frederick Buechner
Suzanne
Shettles Charleston
Curator
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