iris garcia, adam wier, eve ekman
(installation dream team from left to right )
(HE) IS RISEN: The Up & Up
A Site-Specific Installation by Adam Wier for the EpiscoDisco
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA , May 22nd, 2010
Formally, '(He) is Risen: The Up & Up' is a meditation, distilling the notion of sacred space down to a simple childhood sheet fort. Held aloft by balloons harnessing the unbreakable will of helium to rise up, a soft echo of soul within skin, the installation is suspended between anchorage to the earth and transcendence to the sky. In contrast to the vastness of Grace Cathedral, designed to inspire awe and evoke the infinite heavens, '(He) is Risen' works its contrary magic through an intimate and human scale, calling us down to earth, focusing our thoughts inward and snapping our attention to the present.
Building on that contrast, scaling down, and immediacy, '(He) is Risen' offers a reflection on meeting the basic need for shelter. Supported by balloons that will eventually wilt (slow), pop (fast),or otherwise fail, the installation's tenuous existence mirrors the current housing crisis and questions our faith in the political and economic systems that we rely on to secure this basic need. Whose stars have we hitched our wagons to, and is our faith in these institutions well placed? '(He) is Risen' suggests that we enact a similar simplification of our notion of shelter, distilling the essence of "home"until it becomes accessible.
Fundamentally, '(He) is Risen: The Up & Up' begs a reassessment and re-balancing, a return.
Asides:
1. The title, '(He) is Risen', is some iffy wordplay about reverential capitalization of pronouns for Deity (He, Thee, etc.) and the element symbol for helium on the periodic table, He. Nerd is the word.
2. '(He) is Risen' contains 3 king-sized bedsheets. Shout out to the Magi.
3. The rest of the bedsheets are Queens. Shout out to San Francisco.
Extra Special Thank Yous to Iris and Eve for making the installation a success. So close...
Maximum Thanks to the good folks down at the 'Disco - The Reverend Bertie P, Eve Ekman, and Jean "The Machine" Cooney.