Visible Ties
Karen Brummund’s Invisible Gaze is the first work of video art to be featured on the cover of a CIVA directory. This is emblematic of CIVA’s growth into a new century that is increasingly digitized. Invisible Gaze explores what is gained and what might be lost on a human level in a culture where technologies both make reaching across the globe instantaneous and create barriers to connecting. In Invisible Gaze, Brummund uses this new, at least by art history standards, technology of video to track two images, one of a mother and the other of an infant, as they are carried by unseen messengers around London. Constantly in motion, they anchor or orient each other. Each move by one generates a counter move by the other. This push and pull, both visual and psychological, not only moves the mother and child across the city but carries the viewer through the film. Nevertheless, while the two images attempt to keep their connection, their sight line, unbroken, our own ability to see them becomes increasingly distorted over the course of the five-minute video.
In exploring our postmodern, some might call it post-human, predicament, Brummund also evokes one of the oldest subjects of Christian art, the mother and child. Invisible Gaze is, in part, an heir to Giotto’s Arena Chapel depiction of the nativity in which he focuses on the human drama of the maternal-infant relationship of Mary and Christ, possibly at the moment that they see each other’s face for the first time. While specifically rooted in a present dialog, Brummund’s art makes manifest an invisible tie that the contemporary artist of faith has to history. The opportunity and challenge, worked out over and over in the art illustrated in this directory, is the possibility of establishing a continuity with history by drawing it into the present.
The CIVA Visions section, and the directory as a whole, demonstrate that this task is open to a vast diversity of mediums, styles, and philosophies of art. Space here does not permit me to articulate how each artist in this section, in their own way, is a carrier of tradition and an innovator whose vision expands the realm of creative and spiritual possibility that is CIVA. From figurative to abstract, formal to conceptual, and tragic to humorous, the artistic strategies manifested in these works suggest how the exchange between faith and art remains not only fertile soil for creative action but is also vitally urgent to our own moral mooring, a visible tie, as we are carried by unseen forces, be they material, technological, social, or spiritual. This dual responsibility to grow and preserve remains the highest calling of the contemporary artist of faith.
James Romaine - Juror