Homes of My Past is part of the Homesick exhibit at the Art Gallery inside LifeLink Church (1015 S Cooper St, Memphis, TN 38104); it is on display through November 4^th 2009.

The first thing noticeable about Rachel Lockridge’s paintings is the extreme vertical orientation of the pieces. They are in the most elementary critique simple, architectural paintings, and as such a horizontal direction seems far more a propos—assuming that the buildings are the subjects. These are not skyscrapers piercing the clouds; they are residential buildings gathered close to the ground, towered over by the local flora, and dwarfed by the vertical: the endless blue sky, the billowy clouds and the infinite regress beyond.

The philosopher, Paul Crowther, tells us that “a work of art enables the self to move beyond and outside itself toward another object”—providing a reconciled relationship with the world; “it is the space between Self and Other, the metaxu, the rich between.”[1] It is this space—this between—where we discover Lockridge’s true subject; it is the space, itself. For in it she finds reconciliation in all its forms; most notably though with her own, small world.

The space can dwarf us; it can make us feel so insignificant—so trivial. Or worse, it can prompt us to consider the emptiness, devoid of signs. We might walk away considering nihilism or a hopelessness rooted in our own smallness: our quaint dwellings swallowed up or unconsidered by the grandness of the infinite. This is the tension in her paintings—irrelevance, but looking closer it isn’t the sky that imposes this message rather it is the earth-brown homes firmly grounded and lost in the soils that they rest upon which forces us to consider the Biblical message “from dust to dust”. The giant mouthed sky 2/3 of each painting is not the threat, it is earth-boundedness which paws at each of us to make us its own.

The sky on the other hand, is richly textured with washes of paint: sometimes with clouds rising like steeples other times like panels of stained glass interacting with the delicateness of light. There exists a serenity in them that smacks not of emptiness but presence. If it is not seen at first it is because the presence itself seems allusive at times, but allusive because of its pervasiveness—the way something that is always around seems to disappear or at least becomes unnoticed simply due to its ubiquity. Alexander Schmemann writes:

All that exist is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation.[2]

The largeness of the sky and its ubiquity do threaten but not the human element in the image; rather it threatens the earth-boundedness. Meaning trumps irrelevance in her paintings

And this is what Lockridge is hinting at: the home as sanctuary; a place where God is felt, communed with and made known; significance and meaning; a scene simple, straight-forward, and everyday that points back to God—providing value. It is always there but often our views need re-orientation. All the cosmos is a sanctuary from the most grand to the most banal if the lens is turned just so. Lockridge turns the lens to redeem her little insignificant patches of soil—what she calls “nostalgia…leaky windows and dirty sidewalks, the loud neighbors and pungent curry simmering next door.” A lens turned horizontal makes these just nostalgia with no greater purpose, but Lockridge sees God in everything and wants us to re-orient our lenses to move “beyond and outside” with her to see “His presence and wisdom, love and revelation” in nothing but the leaky windows and pungent curry sauce of the everyday: the divine food in the unexceptional.

[1]Daniel Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Grand Rapids Michigan: Baker Academic Press, 2008), 27.

[2]Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 14.