Sheryn Singer: Immaculate Perceptions
In 1988 Chicago’s Old Saint Patrick’s Church announced an art competition for a depiction of the Virgin and Child, offering a $10,000 prize to the winner. When that piece and the runners-up were exhibited, I went off to look, wondering if it’s possible to produce good sacred art in late-20th-century America. I concluded that it isn’t easy. The winner, a wispy, almost abstract drawing, wasn’t very impressive, and a painting of the Virgin as a fleshy nude in a television-equipped tenement room was no more than amusing because it was so badly painted. The only works that moved me were two that looked like ruined frescoes or decayed paintings. The contest and its results made me wonder whether traditional ideas of the sacred have been lost to our culture.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Sheryn Singer’s 15 collages combine printed images of saints she bought at garage sales and the like with paper cutouts of flowers intended to decorate scrapbooks. In most of these works flowers and smaller images of saints form an elaborate baroque border around a saint at the center. These kitschy saints–cliched facial expressions, skin painted as if by the numbers–look plastic, sterile. Where Fra Angelico’s figures seem liquid, the colors almost mystically transparent in the mind’s eye, these sit flat on the page.
Where Singer concentrates on only a few kinds of images, Nancy Bromberg takes the kitchen-sink approach. In her 15 sculptures she uses everything from wooden figures she carves herself to spoons, mirrors, thermometers, coins, beads, and candles. Each piece is bewildering, often humorous. Like Singer, Bromberg revels in excess, piling object on object until the proliferation of things makes its own patterns.
In the early centuries of Christianity, concerted attempts were made to differentiate sacred and secular art. Gregorian chant had no instrumental accompaniment so that the listener could concentrate on the words; saints were painted not in everyday surroundings but against gold backgrounds that represented eternity. The work of Singer, Bromberg, and Duncan, however, looks a lot like other, self-expressive current art–nothing wrong with that, but it makes one wonder whether the earlier tradition of religious art has been lost for good. It hasn’t.
