Burning Bush
Kevin Schmidt
2005
Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Artspeak Gallery, Vancouver, from September 10 to October 15, 2005. Speculating on belief, Kevin Schmidt’s video Burning Bush and Juan Gaitan’s essay Doubt as an Optical Illusion, instigate discussions around faith, disbelief and humanity. Schmidt’s extended landscape portrait of a burning bush intermingles religious, political and art historical mythologies to point to the languages, both visual and textual, of doctrine. In the staging of a miracle, the bush assumes a kind of faltering breath, a sense of possibility. If the bush is indeed “a sleeping life,” Burning Bush awakens in the viewer the prospect of humanistic consideration. Schmidt’s and Gaitan’s investigations are pertinent given the ongoing disasters reported on daily: New Orleans’ sinking, Iraq’s continued bedlam, environmental disaster, terror. In this climate of physical and philosophical crisis, miracles gain possibility, potency and even efficacy. They can ask us to suspend our (dis)belief and bear witness to the world. Burning Bush extends an invitation to meditate on aesthetic, cultural, political and spiritual references, offering the potential of sublime wonder and growth.
Artspeak
Artspeak
Identifier
L0208Call Number
N6549.S389A4 2005Extent
32 pages : illustrations ; softcover 24 cmLanguage
ISBN
0921394535Edition
Edition of 500Place of Publication
Vancouver, BCPublication Type
PrintArtist
Kevin SchmidtCurator
Melanie O'BrianWriter
Juan A. GaitánPublisher
ArtspeakCollection
grunt gallery LibraryCopyright 2005 Artspeak, Kevin Schmidt, Juan A. Gaitán.