Constructed Belief – Art Exhibit

Four artists Mara Baldwin, Ben Cowan, Nicki Green, and Muhammad Z. Zaman use gesture and repetition to explore how ritual builds and redefines faith and community.

A constructed object is created over time, through repetition. So, too, is belief. Repetitious actions ground us, whether in a faith tradition, a cultural organization, a summer camp, or a friend group. Repetitious actions are often reliant upon gestures like saying the Rosary, cleansing in a Mikvah, cooking a family meal, facing towards Mecca, or weaving a friendship bracelet. The crafting of ritual is reliant on shared gesture, on collective repetition. Constructed Belief exists at the intersection of ritual, repetition, and gesture: how repetitious actions build meaning in creating artwork, and in renegotiating faith and community. The four artists in this exhibition use gesture to speak to religious and cultural ritual and redefine it for themselves.
Mara Baldwin‘s intricately drawn images of Girl Scout camp culture examine the ways friendship building and ritual are combined, particularly in a proto-Utopian summer camp environment. These surreal and hyper-detailed works on paper are both playful and rewarded by close attention. Ben Cowan’s luminous paintings center details of hands, lips, organs, and plants from Renaissance religious paintings. They are painted within a frame to distill them down to gesture. These gestural fragments, cast in aqua-resin, are paracosmic vignettes that craft a language through repetition. Nicki Green‘s ceramic vessels examine Judaism through the lens of transness and ritual transformation. These vessels are at once objects of traditional practice, and sites of growth, accretion, permutation, and change. Muhammad Z. Zaman‘s calligraffiti paintings combine English, Arabic, and Bangla in a (re)negotiation of his Muslim faith and identity. The works, and his practice, are a meditation on grief and joy, contemplation and movement.