Advisor: Howardena Pindell

As someone raised Baptist, who grew up in the church, Christianity is one of the primary influences on my understanding of the world. Within that context, my view of Christianity and my relationship with God was strife with confusion, mystique, and the notion that I must commit to blindly trusting an omnipresent power I didn’t quite understand. However, following a pivotal moment in my life, I experienced a period of disillusionment that completely transformed my views and relationship with Christianity, and religion, as a whole. I came out on the other side with a new understanding, and that perspective, developed post-disillusionment, is one I chose to explore in my body of work Reflections of a Higher Power.

Before, I, like many who follow Christianity, made the mistake of thinking that God is one thing. However, this idea has often felt limiting. By picturing God as one thing, the human mind generally wants to push us to define the picture of what that thing looks like. Islam tries to avoid this natural bias by removing the humanistic iconography of its religious figures; therefore, Allah, or God, is not ever visualized as a human, along with any other religious figures. In Christianity, however, I have found that many people who believe in a higher power see it as a representation of themselves, which makes sense because we formulate images based on our observations. Under this premise, if you know what you look like more than you do someone in a different region of the world, a humanization of this higher power will look more like you than anyone else. For example, paintings of Jesus throughout Europe during the Renaissance compared to religious paintings made in African American communities.

Reflections of a Higher Power exists in conversation with that unspoken idea that God looks like someone in any particular way, explored through my perspective. I have transitioned from the belief that God is a thing that can be represented by one human-or any human at all. However, I chose to pursue my body of work under the two pretenses. (1) That God is not a thing to be represented by a singular entity and therefore needs no accuracy or consistency to its representation within art, and (2) if God is a figurative representation, it does not have to look like one person, it can be shown as many. Rather than an individualized take, my work explores themes of collectivity, connection, and a general lack of specificity. The larger point that Reflections of a Higher Power addresses is that we are as much God as any other person, and in that manner, anyone or thing can be a representation. Collectively, we all share the same makings, and religious figures such as God and Jesus can live through us collectively instead of being non-inclusive representations.

The physical exhibition of my work is a chronologically told story, meant to be walked through in a specific way. It tells a story that takes viewers through the beginning of my initial understanding to my final musings on religion. This story starts with the five portraits that open the exhibit. They serve as a depiction of our collective power. Under the basis that we are all an extension of one higher power, God, these pieces highlight the fact that this can be presented through any one of us. Anybody can become that religious idol because that holiness exists within everyone. There is not one standard image for how we must envision God, and here we can see the different variations of perception that can exist. This is in direct conversation with the religious depiction of holy figures throughout and after the early Renaissance. Christian pictures would often depict white men as their religious icons. My work is a direct contrast to this in that I have chosen to present men and women that do not share physical features and can not be assumed to be the same person in any of the portraits. In doing so, I wanted to present the idea that there are various ways that we can imagine a figurative representation of God.

Following the portraits, there is a painting of five figures whose heads blend into each other. This is a reference to our interconnectedness with each other. I chose to blend their heads and have them melt into each other, in a sense, to show that there is no start or end to our connection with each other, and more importantly, no clear start or definition to our individuality. I wanted to push the theme of connectedness and unison within my body of work. By choosing to blend us into one amalgamation, I am not only physically intertwining us, but representing the collection of shared experiences throughout humanity.

These first two sections of the exhibit represent different pillars of my transitional understanding of Christianity and religion in a broader sense, as well as my disillusionment. At the beginning of the body of work, when I stopped believing that God can be presented as one thing, I began to realize that my views were more in line with Buddhist beliefs and Panentheistic philosophy, which is the belief that the holiness and divinity Christians attribute to an omnipresent God intersects every part of the universe and operates outside of the bounds of time and space. As that applies to humans and my painting, I attempted to explore the argument that we need to start seeing the spirituality in the holiness that exists throughout all of us. As that message applies to my concept, the paintings are supposed to be communicating that although we are many individuals, we all are one in a very real way because we are all made from the same things in the same spaces. To push it even more I want the viewers to challenge the idea even further. Rather than seeing us as individuals who are part of a collective, I want them to see us as different components of the same unit, like the multiple roots that make up one large tree. That’s the purpose of that blended painting; to push forth that message that we are all one thing presented as different parts.

Moving past these initial stages of awakening came a period of disillusionment and understanding overall in this spiritual realignment. This disillusionment was expressed in the seventh painting, a figure kneeling over underneath a window with the suggestion of a holy figure above them. This part of the exhibit represents my mindset after I began to process the difference in how are used to view religion versus how I see it now. It felt like the world around me had changed, even though only my perception was different. The figure kneels in prayer to represent my lingering ties to the Christian community. The holy figure in the background is intentionally painted vaguely. Now, the beliefs about God that I established in my formative years resonate much less with me. They have become stepping stones to a more refined outlook on the broader topic of religion, and I chose to communicate that sentiment through my painting with this soft impression of a religious figure to show that it is not the guiding force, but a leading force in the sense that it inspired my thinking now. Whereas angels and religious icons are normally painted in an easily recognizable manner, the painting is not drawn in a detailed way where you can make out anything beyond the shape and the energy around it. I wanted it to have the effect for the viewer of trying to see what it is and not being able to determine what it is with confidence.

The last painting of the exhibit signifies the end of my journey and the peak of my new understanding. The two figures have budding angel wings to reference the transformation taking place. Now that I’ve gone through this experience, I see the world differently. I see all of humanity as holy. Drawing these budding angel wings on my figures is my attempt to call out the fact that this process of understanding has changed my perspective. However, they’re only budding because learning, and especially relearning, is long, and the moment that feels like your last is usually only the newest beginning. I also carried over some of the orange colors from the previous painting on disillusionment and the evolution of the understanding because that is a connected part of the process, more directly connected than the other sections.

In a broad overview, this body of work is a retrospective of my religious ideology and a conversation about the various ways in which we perceive the figures of our religions. It serves as a vessel to question common practices and inspire conversations about them. By removing a lot of the religious allure to these representations, we ground ourselves in our ideologies and our relationships with Godly figures, and one of my main goals was to bring a more humane connection to how we interact with God. Through the use of oil on different mediums such as hardboard, canvas, and birch wood I expressed my thoughts in a figurative visual form meant to inspire dialogue and challenge the status quo.