8TH + PENN
ON VIEW
Frank Menchaca
David Hanauer
Peggy McClure
Marilyn Narey
Karie Luidens
Frank Menchaca
Job 28:10 (2024)
oil on linen, 30” x 30”
[companion piece] "Activity of Sound"
David Hanauer
Writer's Blood (2024)
3 layer screen print on paper, 30” x 44”
[companion piece] "Crayons"
Peggy McClure
Spring Renewal (2022)
archival digital photograph on luxe paper, 14” x 11”
Morning Shadows (2020)
archival pigment print of photograph, 31” x 20”
[companion piece] "First the Shadows"
First the golden shadows,
are cast on the curtain each morning
by the rising sun.
Out in the warm sun,
black ink bleeds slowly
along the fibers of paper
like the daily news of death.
Submerged into a wash of India ink,
first the morning coffee filters, then
papers documenting life, death;
last wishes; detritus.
Devoured by ink
as though by a slow flame
Rather than fire and smoke,
leaving nothing but ashes,
these papers bleed life
into something new.
Nature, after the bitterest loss,
if left to it, forgives and regrows
At last spring returns,
somewhat scarred
Marilyn Narey
Staying Alive (2023)
paperworks with reconstructed artist’s serigraph print, watercolor, threads
[companion piece] “Staying Alive”
But Can She Dance? (2022)
paperworks with reconstructed and machine stitched artist’s serigraph print, threads
[companion piece] “But Can She Dance?”
Karie Luidens
Andy Warhol (2022)
oil on canvas, 17” x 21”
[companion piece] extract from In the End: A Memoir about Faith and a Novel about Doubt, Chapter 23:
It was a few days later, sitting at a table in the library, that I concluded Jesus really had no place in my beliefs anymore. He needed to go back to his century, suffer under Pontius Pilate, be crucified, and die. That was all. On the third day, nothing particularly remarkable would happen.
Jesus loved me, this I thought, for the Bible told me to think so, but my Bible had changed over the years. When the church presented it to my child-self a decade earlier, it was fresh and impressively heavy in my hands. But as I studied it, the gilding rubbed off the edges; its tissue-y paper grew creased and greasy, its words heavy and strange. The more I knew about it, the more estranged I became. How could I have pushed it farther and farther down my desk behind the other books and still let Christ sit on the desk chair with me in my mind? How could I not see that my relationship to the Messiah was growing worn and creased, too?
Dad had always said Jesus was so important in his faith because he was the embodiment of God’s love and mercy. But now, the steely logic of my reasoning proved to me that God was merciful in and of himself. Jesus, in fact, contradicted God’s mercy by being a bloody sacrifice. And there was no reason to think that God should take up a bunch of flesh and somehow “be” it, and then leave it in the throes of death, and then reanimate it again; why then, why there, why that way, why that body? Could God be so arbitrary, so mystically spontaneous? No. So, Jesus had just been a man, a normal gritty man with a lot of wise things to say.
The holy Son of God faded into the page and then dried up into paper-dust and blew away with the wind. I wrapped myself in a coat and scarf and set out into the late afternoon, and all his bits of meaning got mixed up with the first snow flurries and were gone. I didn’t feel particularly changed by this. I just walked along with my hands in my pockets and my book bag over my shoulder.