Offerings

Our inaugural exhibition featured the work of 15 emerging artists with a fabrication-focused practice, and focused on the altar form to foreground themes of devotion and desire. Whether sacred or secular, the act of offering is common to every human culture; each gift of sacrifice is both a gesture of devotion and an expression of the giver’s desire for a future outcome. Like any sacrifice, creating artworks requires one to set aside time and resources in order to speak to something larger than ourselves. The works on view put diverse ideas of dedication, ritual, belief, and creation into practice by drawing upon the idea of the altar, both as an original form of installation art and as a personal creation that responds to the spaces it inhabits and the people who share in its sensory experience.  In the spirit of action that an offering demands, many of the artworks invited the viewer to take part in the ritual, whether through instructions provided by the artist or through deliberate actions of touch, taste, smell, and experience. 

Some Offerings respond to the creation and destruction cycles of sacrifice, asking what is given and toward what purpose, and what is taken away when we give of ourselves. Others trace the shape of the people who build (or become) these objects of worship, telling their stories of becoming while absenting themselves. And often, the Offerings grapple with the multi-dimensional spectrum of the sacred and profane, calling in many different contexts, traditions, and relationships as they reclaim the magical and the divine for the everyday.

Works were proposed to The Ritual Division in the conceptual stages through an artist call, and accepted proposals were able to access support through funding for fabrication, access to the Division’s shop for building, and skill-sharing resources provided by its builder community. Through this gesture, we conceived of Offerings as a devotional gift of The Ritual Division itself, given to its current and future community to cement our commitment to fabrication and artistic labor as a practice. 

ARTISTS:

Dr. Corinne Brenner
EMMO
Wendy Lee Gadzuk
Griffin Garment
Deana Gore
Ian Henderson
Sue-Yee Leung
Foxie Lou
Shea Molloy
Ashton Posey
Bailey Quinlan
Jessica Rosewillow
lína sandra
Oliver Shallum
Saki Sonoda
Peter Valdez