The Spirituality of the Loss was first exhibited at SITE Gallery during the summer of 2021. The installation examines my religious experience with nature. I am no longer a religious person. Yet having grown up in a small rural town in the forested Rocky Mountains, I have always felt a creeping, longing connection to trees. The only spirituality I now believe in is an unnamed binding force between all humans and all nature. Having lived in a large concrete city for fourteen years where trees are scarce, I still feel an inner force that yearns for nature. The steel trees that I create represent this yearning and perhaps even a kind of loss—a loss to physical relocation, a loss to Capitalism, a loss to climate change. The trees are a dichotomy between a cold manufactured death, and organic forms and desires. Shaped to imitate the unpredictability and three-dimensionality of tree branches, the round steel bars which they are made from are barren and sterilized. The act of cutting down is immortalized by the base plates, which utilize aesthetic qualities to perversely accentuate their point of severance. I have used figural representation to conjure deathly beings into space; a metaphor for the death of my own religious faith and its replacement with nothingness. This is reflected in the title of the work, referencing The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals by Gene Edward Veith Jr. My trees obstruct one’s path through space, forcing interaction with emotional and physical realities which are too often ignored. These are the ghosts of nature.
