Contemporary art exhibit explores spiritual themes

"Perilous Misadventures in Cultural Camouflage: Crux Nova" by Christopher Nadaskay is a new look at old iconography.

For centuries, the Western art tradition was largely a religious one. A new exhibit, "Sitting Up with the Dead," reinvests contemporary art with such contemplation.

Displayed ever so appropriately in a church, the show runs through Aug. 15 at Gallery 210, the second-floor art space inside Lifelink Church, 1015 S. Cooper, and joins the talents of Union University art professors Melinda Eckley and Christopher Nadaskay.

"Perilous Misadventures in Cultural Camouflage: Crux Nova" by Christopher Nadaskay is a new look at old iconography.

"I'll Fly Away" by Melinda Eckley takes its title from the familiar gospel hymn.

Their work couldn't be more disparate -- one visceral and heavy, the other open and gestural -- yet the combined effect is a cohesive and moving post-modern comment on the reliquary. Relic art was a medieval practice of saint veneration through the enshrinement of body parts and items associated with the Holy Land -- a toe bone here, a splinter from the True Cross there -- typically presented in highly ornamented containers and statuettes.

Frame a piece of the past just right and the memories stir, argues Dutch art historian Henk van Os: "Then and only then do the heavens open; it is an epiphany, a sacred moment." Which is also a pretty good way to describe "Sitting Up with the Dead." Hardly morbid, the show's better pieces indeed open the heavens like great reliquary art of the past.

According to Eckley, a Memphis College of Art graduate and former student of Nadaskay, the show is "about what we leave behind more than celebrating death. It's not a sad show. I feel like there's hope at the end of it."

Adds Nadaskay: "Our whole idea was based on the premise of what would be left of our civilization should someone find it in the future."

With that in mind, Nadaskay combines stoneware and mixed media into objects part human, part mechanical, as if the metal fetishist of the Japanese cyberpunk film Tetsuo decided to take up sculpture. The highlight, a huge "new cross" with human ribs that rap around the wood, bears the weighty title, "Perilous Misadventures in Cultural Camouflage: Crux Nova." Yet as the inscription suggests, Nadaskay's cross demands a new way to look at old iconography.

Eckley's pieces, by contrast, appropriate found funereal objects, already instilled with the memories of another time, and preserve them reliquary-like.

"It's important to me that they have a history," she says, though she insists jokingly that she doesn't rob from graves to find what she needs. "I did not get them off of anything!"

In "Epitaph," two coffin plates combine with hand-written letters to spell out "At rest in the heavenly Father," while in "Dead Ringer," gossamer string hangs from five small cemetery bells that await the viewer's "tug." In the show's centerpiece, "I'll Fly Away," lines from the familiar gospel hymn are imprinted on more than a dozen antique handkerchiefs. It is so direct and emotionally cleansing, you'll feel like you were just baptized at a turn-of-the-century camp meeting.

The overt exploration of spiritual themes through contemporary art would have been unthinkable 15 years ago, says Nadaskay. But "the post-modern movement has opened the door in recent years to artists exploring their spirituality as part of their art," he says. "And this is just the solution that Melinda and I came up with."

--------------------

"Sitting Up with the Dead," recent works by Melinda Eckley and Christopher Nadaskay

On display through Aug. 15 at Gallery 210, 1015 S. Cooper. Gallery hours are 9 a.m.-12 p.m. Monday-Friday and 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Sunday. Call 377-3372.

--------------------

© 2010 Go Memphis. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.