Manna Installation 2003
Bread, unconsecrated communion hosts, video projection, text, photocopies, church benches
St. Vincent College Gallery--Artist-in-Residence Installation--Latrobe, Pennsylvania 

Bread in on form or another has been symbol for bring groups of people together.  For centuries communities, in particular monastic communities have gather at the table to break bread for daily physical and spiritual nourishment.  In this Installation the medium of bread operates on a variety of levels.  Some more obvious than others.  In previous work I have focus on imagery that relates to community in a more general secular sense.  Since I have arrived here I have been inspired by the history and stories of the St. Vincent Archabbey and its founding.  I take the opportunity to focus my imagery on ideas and imagery that relates to a specific history as it relates to this community of Benedictine monks.  I have always enjoyed telling stories and in the paper walls, the digital projection of Ash Wednesday Vespers as the other sculptural images, there are opportunities for stories to come alive from this ArchabbeyÕs past.  It is up to you as the viewer to study the images and the manner in which they are put together and displayed.  Upon your investigations you may find yourself submerged in the rich, prosperous and tragic history of this area.  

From the beginning I was fascinated with the image of SportsmanÕs Hall which is probably the singular most important image marking the foundation of this monastery and college.  SportsmanÕs Hall is considered to embody the beginning of the Catholic Church in Western Pennsylvania.  This structure existed in 1848 as Boniface Wimmer arrived from Bavaria to create roots for the Benedictine order.  The monks that came with Boniface all had special trades that collectively created the foundations of St. Vincent.  I found the monastic St. Vincent bread an appropriate building material.  The cabin in a sense represents the Body of Christ.  The monastic community was created and developed spawning other abbeys throughout the United States.  What makes this recreated cabin more significant is that all the flour used to make the bread was milled at our very own gristmill located on the far side of the monastery.  Around the perimeter of the cabin are pour midlings which are a by-product of the flour sifting process.  The gristmill, flour, midlings and bread embody the Benedictine motto of "work and prayer". 

I am always interested in elevating a very usual, ordinary material into a more profound artistic form.  The reprocessesing and transformation of the material allows its meaning to be recontextualized.  This is most evident in the figure of Christ which is entirely created out of unconsecrated communion hosts interlocked with each other.  Catholics believe that Jesus sacrificed his body and his body is transubstantiated into the from of the communion host.  I wanted to unite these two siginificant materials (the body and bread) into one complete form.

Other images allow us to reflect on the history of St. Vincent such as the three portraits of Mary (left) Boniface Wimmer (center) and Christ (right) which form a contemporary version of the traditional tryptch of Christendom. The images are enlarged negatives of etchings of each figure consisting entirely of unconsecrated communion hosts.  The ghosted images are meant to overwhelm you in scale to become larger than life--supernatural.  The is a sense of randomness and order all at once much like the order and randomness we find in the countless stars we find in our night sky.

The projections of Ash Wednesday Vespers at the far end are created in a perspective that allows you to almost feel apart of the ceremony as it is happening.  This is further enhanced by the choir stalls that flank the two sides of the gallery.  This series of daily prayers and chanting of the psalms signifies the unity of this monastic community.  The entire gallery is constructed in a cross form or bascillica format.  The walls that run fourty feet on each side of the gallery consists of pages from a pocket size benedictine prayer book, Latin hymns from the mass and photocopied images from archive photographs that span the history of St. Vincent archabbey and college.  Many of the images mark certain events like the great fire of 1963 that destroyed many of the original buildings of the monastery including the living quarters of the monks and the Student Chapel.  Despite periods of adversity this particular monastic community has stayed united to overcome these obstacles.