Art-Full Life

Nick Clifford Simko. Sometimes I wish it were me instead of you. 2010

We all have cherished personal treasures—reminders of people, events, or places—that elicit powerful memories and feelings. In other times and cultures, these treasures, most often religious, are enshrined in incredible art objects created to preserve and honor them. 

To see some incredible reliquaries, you can stop by the Walters Art Museum’s Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, which closes May 15. A contemporary response to this magical art form was created by MICA students working with sculptor Jann Rosen-Queralt and art historian Barbara Baxter. Their works, some still on view at the Walters until May 22, and others until recently displayed at nearby Current Space, show how the ideas conveyed by reliquaries reverberate into the 21st century.

Several artists questioned the presence of relics within the reliquary.  Are these really the remains of saints and are any still housed inside these vessels?  Dimitri Brand enclosed a blank screen, familiar from home movies, inside a standing wooden frame, its fleeting projected image long gone. Benjamin Briere’s cast plastic shapes, perhaps human faces, appeared nearly empty but for the shadows and reflections of their own smooth surfaces, and in another of his sculptures, a welded steel frame supported an eloquent but blank sheet of pierced aluminum.  In The Book of Right On, Alex DiJulio threw open the doors of an empty cabinet created from found wood, its soft surfaces porous and bleached white. Was this a reliquary that had been pilfered by a not-so-saintly soul?  Nick Simko’s terrarium does hold relics from the exhibiting artists, each wrapped in canvas and tied with a cord.

Dimitri Brand. Three Boxes. 2010

Others chose everyday materials to explicate the themes of medieval reliquaries. Stevie Dissinger reminds us that unlike immortal relics, our mortal bodies require continual cleansing. In Mortal Spring, an automatic dispenser drips soap down a gray pedestal and in Holy Composites, a single bar of old-fashioned ivory soap is encased in a glass square.  In his Three Boxes, Dimitri Brand presented uncommonly beautiful toothpaste, boxed and ready for sale, one tube encased in wood, another in a folded cardboard box, and finally, some toothpaste squeezed into a plastic container, its turquoise stripes surprisingly appealing for a substance intended to clean teeth.  Graham Wimbrow’s Fermentation & Transubstantiation, an arrangement of functional kitchen items, comments on the spiritual mystery of Christ’s body and blood. 

Perhaps inspired by medieval Madonnas, a number of the artists took up the theme of motherhood. Nick Simko’s Sometimes I Wish it Were Me Instead of You is a modern altarpiece.  In the center of its tripartite frame, we see a shrouded young man, presumably the artist, lying beneath a framed portrait of his deceased mother.  On side panels, death figures display portraits of mother and son, as though death is still deciding between the two.

Aden Weisel. Relics of Motherhood, 2010

Aden Weisel’s two Relics of Motherhood incorporate handwritten narratives and illumination-like drawings into found books to offer a commentary on a mother’s burdens.   At Current, the books were arrayed on a familiar living room side table, a chair beside it inviting us to sit down and perhaps even pick up one of the books and read.  At the Museum, where the books have been arranged vertically and protected in a case, we can see that the books are chosen for their subjects: one spine reads What Only a Mother Can Tell You About Having a Baby and in another, on a page headed “Discipline,” she shows us a distressed mother separating two fighting children. Kathryn Barrett’s Why Luna turns her back to the world reminds us that mothers can burden their offspring.   Two ceramic hands clasp, supported by a forearm ornamented with rows of moon symbols tattooed across its silver skin.  The endlessly repeated lunar cycle speaks to the artist’s painful memories, as she has struggled again and again to cope with the sad, recurring cycle of her mother’s alcoholism.

Kathryn Barrett. Why Luna turns her back to the world. 2010

For Anna Gulyavskaya, the artist is the reliquary for the memories she depicts in The Reason. Only she can reveal her narrative.  Jacob Whayne Dillow suggests that that the stories of some venerated saints are obscured.  In his Incorruptible, a fully dressed saint lies on the floor, a single gold hand resting on his chest, wild flowers sprouting from where his face might have been.  How did he die and why does he seem so pleasantly at rest with nature?  Kyle Dunn’s subjects are far less at peace.  His Revelation rises like a small bush, saintly hands seemingly growing from its black and orange limbs and leaves. Another piece hangs from the wall, contorted hands woven into a black wax wreath, the torture of martyrdom more clearly implied in their gestures.