Communion
"I felt transfixed by the process." Real blood is warm. Real blood is unclean. Real blood is common. This pew looks right out of a church, but the transformation it has undergone is extreme. Stripped of its original stain, it has been covered in a mixture of blood (obtained from a butcher shop in southern Michigan) and wine. The viewer is encouraged to sit on the pew, and is therefore implicated in the violence of its making. But aren't we all? On the opposite side of the pew, softly glowing from the hymn rack, is a custom LED screen that changes depending on where it is shown. Sometimes, it is a poem, written by clipping portions of the US Constitution and the Bible - two of America's "founding documents", if Christian Nationalists are to be believed. Other times, it pans down an image of the infamous stained glass window now thankfully replaced in the National Cathedral depicting Robert E. Lee as a saint to the "Lost Cause" myth. Behind it, fire flickers.
No matter who we are, we are surrounded by material that constructs our view of the world. It is up to us to question-to sound the idols, and discover if they indeed ring true.
