A series of work created as part of the Artist in Residence Program at Hope Center for Arts and Technology. The Gallery show was on display in the Loft Gallery at HopeCAT May 2024. Works included prints done via silkscreen and relief linocut, stoneware ceramics, and painted wood sculptures, in addition to a written piece of fiction to accompany the narrative connection between pieces. 

From Psalm 42:7, “abyssus abyssum invocat,” or “deep calls to deep.” Some Christian interpretations believe the phrase to symbolize the soul’s longing for God, an integral part of the human experience that desires to be reunited with our previous form. In selected Jewish literature, the word for ‘abyss’ referred to the underworld, while the book of Revelations refers to the place as the origin of beasts and hellish monsters. How do we reconcile these two concepts? Is this boundless space benevolent or evil, good or bad, or are such concepts trivial to the greater understanding of the divine? Regardless, there is a human fascination with the world after death and a calling to the unknown that is inherent to our being.

These works tell a fairy tale exploring the concept of this gray area. The protagonist begins the story by being found guilty of patricide and sentenced to death. In a chance to commute his sentence, he is offered a deal to descend the pit located under the Monastery of Saint Michal and report if its legends of being a portal to hell are true. To return from his visit to the underworld alive, he trades his humanity to the devil for eternal life, surviving the ordeal. Knowing he can never return to the outside world, he lives as one of the monks, learning writing and illustration to document his strange experiences in his new home and its proximity to the underworld. 

Desert saints is a series of paintings exploring the relationship between hermeticism and sexuality. Within the Catholic faith, desert saints are often characterized by strict asceticism and isolation, removing themselves from earthly pleasures in pursuit of holy living. Yet their stories also involve intense dreams or visions of temptations in which demons attempt to lure them away from their purity with indulgent sexual offers. 

The deeming of these men as saints allows them to become a model for Catholic dedication, especially those of the monastic community. Yet the explicit sexual nature of their stories and depictions of such circulated visual arts that were meant to be arousing for the general public, justified under the pretense that this was what was meant to be avoided. 

We may look upon the works of Bosch, with their chaotic displays of nude forms and images of demonic creatures and sensual pleasures as unusual, considering a popular conception of the time period being conservative and anti-sex. But The Garden of Earthly Delights is punctuated by a scene of intense suffering at the final judgement– Our depictions of pleasure can often be excused as showing what acts not to commit, but they will be shown nonetheless. Perhaps in the same sense that the hermetic saints found their pleasures after all, only in the dream realm, while their names stay sanctified as men of devout chastity and discipline. 

In the West, we are taught not to be emotional in the public sphere, our private wants and needs could bleed into the front-facing persona at the detriment of any authority or respect we have. There may be a sense of envy then, to see a figure command reverence despite having all their dirty laundry on display–so long as all they have to do is shake their head at it.