Ritual Unlenowing Curated by Blue Reinhard & Jamie Martinez

About

"‘Ritual Unknowing’ engages with the liminal spaces found at the edges of our comprehensive views of the world. The work considers what is lost when we try to define these boundaries through language, and what sacred meanings can arise through nonverbal engagement with the Unknown. By externalizing this notion of sacrality of the Unknown, rituals are created - whether consciously or intuitively. ‘Ritual Unknowing’ considers the act of creating an art object as a key example of ritual externalization of the Unknown. The visual art object thus becomes akin to a votive object, having the capacity to lead us into the realm of the divine, the mystic, and the abject by providing a framework for nonverbal understanding that we can engage with subliminally, emotionally, and corporeally. 

If the art object can be seen as votive, placing such an object within the gallery recontextualizes the consumerist space as one to engage with the spiritual, while the gallery’s commodification of the art object complicates the spiritual value of the work. Viewers are led into a fraught relationship with the work, as both worshiper and consumer. This tension between constructed quantitative value of the commodified art object and the subjective value of the spiritually-imbibed art ritual is at play, allowing viewers to determine the value of the works themselves. Each piece individually and uniquely reckons with the artists’ systems of understanding, with each work engaging in interrelated conversations around meaning-making, ritual acts, value, and transformation."