Art for Pilgrim & Passerby
By Sue Careless
Crossings – A Journey to Easter may surprise those who are familiar with the Stations of the Cross as figurative paintings or bas-relief lining the nave of a church.
The outdoor art exhibit in Toronto is designed and executed by 16 professional artists, each with a unique vision and preferred medium. Rather than figurative art at each station, the pilgrim or passerby is greeted occasionally with abstract works and often non-traditional Christian symbolism in sculpture, painting and mixed media.
Imago Arts invited Canadian artists of faith to create works for the fourteen Scriptural Stations of the Cross and one each for the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem and the Resurrection. The art works are not all sombre. In fact, Triumphal Entry and Resurrection, while rather abstract, burst with colour.
Most of the other 14 stations feature human portraiture, often of different ethnic groups, whether African, Cree, Korean, Mohawk, or Slavic, identifying Christ with the humanity shared by all nations. And the Christ figures vary not only in ethnicity but also in age from a young beardless Christ to one who is late middle-aged.
Triumphal Entry by James Patterson is a whimsical wire sculpture from his Prayer Machine series. Although it is static on the street – protected by a display case for security reasons – passersby with smart phones can view a video of it in motion. Those searching for the traditional symbols of palm leaves and a donkey will not find them. Instead flags wave and pinwheels turn above a playful street scene bursting with colour and delight. The joy of Palm Sunday is there.
Iconographer Symeon van Donkelaar’s The Cup captures the foolishness of the sleeping disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane. Rather than struggling in anguish over the bitter cup of suffering, the Christ figure seems at the point of acceptance, as an angel hovers at his shoulder.
As you begin to walk eastward along Hoskins Avenue to the next station, turn around and you will see Michael O’Brien’s two icons of Jesus and Mary in the upper windows of the Newman Centre. They are not part of Crossings but are on permanent display at the Catholic student centre. We will meet O’Brien’s installation later at Station 4.
In front of Trinity College, we see Patricia June Vickers’ Jesus Betrayed by Judas. The back of a blood-red Christ figure stands small and alone against an overwhelmingly dark background. The limited palette emphasizes the sacrifice about to be made when facing ultimate evil.
Vickers is of British, Tsimshian, Heiltsuk and Haida First Nation ancestry. She grew up in Victoria B.C. with art all around her, learning traditional applique fabric designs. She began to paint “out of a need to express what I couldn’t say in words.” An Anglican, she is not only an artist but also a psychotherapist and spiritual director.
Anglican artist Betty Spackman created an eye-catching multimedia banner Explain Yourself that faces Queen’s Park Crescent beside Wycliffe College. Illustrating the moment when Jesus is condemned by the Sanhedrin, twelve accusing fingers point at the photographic image of a newborn lamb nuzzled by its mother. “Explain yourself” is printed in bold caps at the bottom of a mock film frame. On closer observation, the words “I am,” also in bold caps, can be seen imposed on the image of the lamb. At the top of the banner are two more pointing vector icons which would seem to repeat the accusatory nature of the Sanhedrin. But they could also symbolize Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam fresco in the Sistine Chapel. After all they appear in the upper vault of the banner.
Spackman’s book A Profound Weakness: Christians and Kitsch (2005) looks at images of faith in popular culture.
In Peter’s Denial Michael David O’Brien sets two large bearded figures in neo-Byzantine style set against a strikingly red backdrop. An agitated Peter is in the foreground with a clenched fist and open mouth, uttering his terrible denial. He has turned his back on Jesus, who silently looks upon his disciple with great pity and tenderness. Though Jesus’ hands and neck are bound, he remains calm while Peter, the free man, is distraught.
Since 1976 the Roman Catholic artist, who is self-taught, has painted religious imagery exclusively. O’Brien is also the accomplished author of 13 novels, including Father Elijah and Sophia House.
A print of Ovide Joseph Bighetty’s vibrant acrylic painting In Justice for the Just hangs as a banner facing busy Queen’s Park Crescent. As Jesus is brought before Pilate an owl hovers over his head. A boreal forest is outlined in the background with the landscape and sky full of colour and glory.
Born in 1969 in Pukatawagan First Nation on Manitoba’s Canadian Shield, Bighetty worked as a self-taught Cree artist mainly in acrylics on virtually any kind of material, including birch bark, wood, hide and rock.
In 2001, the Indian Metis Christian Fellowship (now known as the Indigenous Christian Fellowship) commissioned Bighetty to create artwork depicting the visions of First Nations elders, combining Indigenous symbolism with biblical sources. He eventually completed 17 images telling the story of Kisemanito Pakitinasuwin — The Creator’s Sacrifice in the Woodland style of Norval Morrisseau. Woodland style painting is characterized by bright colours, bold outlines, spirit lines, abstract forms and nature subjects.
Originally painted in acrylic on canvas and framed in cedar, Bighetty’s Passion narrative uses Indigenous symbolism throughout. In one crucifixion scene, Christ is tied to a white birch pole while a red eagle soars above his head. Later when Christ’s body is being taken down, only the eagle’s dark shadow is seen on the ground.
Sadly, the accomplished artist was only 44 when he died in 2014.
Brian David Johnston, who describes himself as a mixed-media, Tradigital artist, has created Jesus Crowned with Thorns. We see a simple black tent-like structure on which rests a bloodied crown, not of thorns but of grape vines. Two digital self-portraits of the middle-aged artist are displayed on each side of the tent, both conveying great anguish and torment.
Tradigital art combines both traditional and computer-based techniques to create an image. Johnston is of Indigenous Six Nations (Mohawk) descent who describes his art as “an attempt to communicate the human soul in exile and its hope of redemption.”
Christ Takes Up the Cross by Colleen McLaughlin Barlow is a polished bronze statue of Christ lifting up what appears to be a billowing acrylic cloud or cape, deep inside of which is a delicate silver cross. Jesus is beardless with short hair, much as he was portrayed in the first millennium of Christian art. Barlow said she wanted to capture the moment when Jesus willingly took up his cross, not the beaten and exhausted Christ figure usually portrayed in Western art.
In a video describing her sculpture, Barlow said, “There is a greater truth here, he reached for the cross and said ‘I will do what I have to do.’ That is the moment all history turns on.”
Barlow has studied human and animal anatomy extensively in various laboratories and what at first glance appears to be an acrylic cloud or cape being held aloft is actually a model of the human sacrum, or tailbone. It is that triangular piece, the skeletal keystone in our centre, and she found that if you made it transparent, within it is a light shaped like a cross.
Although the sculpture stands just 30” high, it is most compelling.
Ruthia Pak Regis’ acrylic on canvas painting Women of Jerusalem features babies and female figures, some pregnant, within a pleasant wooded landscape. Pak Regis initially was going to include a Jesus figure but said that as she meditated on the passage, “It was striking to me that he points all the emotional energy away from himself redirecting it to the women themselves.”
The Anglican artist re-examined her own experience as a woman and as she saw it in her mother and her own young daughters. All the figures are of her daughters, herself and her mother at different points in their lives. “This going inward to my own experience was in the hope that it would then lead outward to God himself.”
Homeless Jesus was designed by Timothy Schmalz, a Canadian sculptor and devout Catholic. It depicts Jesus as a homeless person, sleeping on a park bench. His face and hands are obscured, hidden under a blanket, but his pierced feet reveal his identity. The statue has been described as a “visual translation” of Matthew 25 in which Jesus tells his disciples, “As you did it to one of the least of my brothers, you did it to me.”
Schmalz intended his life-size bronze sculpture to be provocative, admitting, “That’s essentially what the sculpture is there to do. It’s meant to challenge people.”
Some see Homeless Jesus as honouring and comforting the marginalized. People are sometimes seen sitting on the bench, resting their hands on Jesus and praying.
Schmalz offered the first casts to St. Michael’s Cathedral in Toronto and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, but both churches declined, claiming in part that they were undergoing renovations. In 2013 the cast intended for St. Michael’s was installed at Regis College, the Jesuit School of Theology at the University of Toronto. Other casts have since been installed across the globe.
In Komi Olaf’s The Repentant Thief, the canvas is filled completely with people of African descent. You are struck first by two distraught women wailing in the foreground as other women try to comfort them. The woman in the right-hand corner stares out at the viewer, challenging us to take in this horrific scene. Rising behind them is Christ crucified between the two thieves, who are tied to their crosses. The thief on his right is looking towards Jesus, while the other looks down. Below Christ’s cross young men gather while a Roman soldier stands guard to one side.
The soldier appears in traditional Roman headdress and armour while Christ wears only a loincloth. All the other figures are in modern dress, the women wearing African headscarves. All the figures are rendered in full, almost hyper-realistic colour, while a flat grey modern cityscape rises in the background. The sky, however, is not dark but golden like one would see in an icon.
Olaf (also spelt Olafimihan) is an African-Canadian Anglican. His art has been shaped by a cultural and artistic movement known as Afrofuturism, which explores African and African diasporic cultures in intersection with technology.
At the next station we find Maria Gabankova’s Jesus Entrusts Mary to John. A crucified Christ dominates the scene but he looks down with pity at his mother and John. The young disciple touches Mary’s shoulder as she prays dejectedly at her Son’s pierced feet. Gabankova excels in portraiture and at the foot of the cross are gathered people of all ages, including depictions of Gabankova’s husband and some of her friends. In the lower left is a howling Goya-like spectre.
Her charcoal on paper collage also includes some metallic surfaces so that the viewer can be part of the crowd. At the bottom of the cross is a photograph of a skull, the traditional symbol of human mortality and of Golgotha, “the place of the skull” where Christ died.
Gabankova grew up in a family of visual artists and political dissidents in former Czechoslovakia. Based in Toronto, she still spends time in Prague.
One of the more startling works in the exhibit is Paul Roorda’s Tally for the station “Jesus is Laid in the Tomb” which stresses memento mori “Remember you must die.” Instead of a skull, Roorda employs a stainless-steel mortuary body tray that is so polished as to mirror the viewer’s face if she stands close enough. Etched into the upright tray, around the body’s shadow, are rows of the symbol IIII, tallying time, another reminder that our days are numbered. Although facing Yonge Street, Toronto’s busiest thoroughfare, the installation is set so far back that many pedestrians may not notice it. Only a searching pilgrim would find it in amongst some evergreens, a fit spot for a garden tomb of sorts.
Resurrection by mixed media artist Lynne McIlvirde is a painted 3-dimensional wooden wheel. Instead of a traditional white Easter lily, the central flower looks more like a blue Morning Glory. There are no human figures but hands and angels’ wings reach out to touch human ears. Gold, rose, turquoise and blue predominate and leave one with a sense of mystery.
Other artists featured in Crossings are Phil Irish and Farhad O’Neill.
“The real beauty within the Christian faith is a broken beauty not an idealized beauty,” said Franklin. “It doesn’t resist or reject brokenness. It finds another level of beauty by embracing the brokenness, which is what the cross is. It is a self-giving for the sake of the other. The true spirituality we’re called to is an embodied faith that walks the Via Dolorosa.” TAP
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For more information on the exhibit, which closes on Apr. 20, see www.crossingstoronto.com. A full-colour catalogue containing 16 original writings commissioned from Canadian poets along with meditations on the biblical texts can be purchased at https://checkout.square.site/buy/5DHEV22VBAUEEPSU5K55KMWZ.
