Brittany Ham

On Anno Domini

The expanse is a poor sight indeed. Churches have become somewhat ubiquitous in our present surroundings and are often overlooked amidst the mad rush of progress. We have become so acclimated to their presence that we fail to notice them. They are perceived somewhere between presence and absence. They stand just over the edge of the day’s activities, taking up a semi-transparent existence while the currents of daily life rush past them like an accelerated elapse that reluctantly transpires in real time. What is the secret of their discreet stasis and how do their decorative histories visually profess their spiritual values?

The premise of Anno Domini is with the understanding that photography has its root in the industrial age and not in the church as it is with the other arts of representation. It is a product of secular innovation that holds no history within the illuminated sphere of religious art. From this absence there arises a need to direct the metaphor of light to its ultimate Source. But how is one able to surmount the gap that is the mechanical process? How can the mirror mimic our Creator’s swinging back to His image and how can one redirect this process into an act of veneration?  Do we pursue this aim in our subjects and the manner in which we approach them? I’m not interested in answers but in the attempt, and somewhere in the marriage of theological concepts and form lies the means of an attempt to fill this void – for our errors and failures are more permissible when they arise from an endeavor that made no promises.

Repetitions can evolve into rituals that find expression in complex patters ripe in the geometric garden. These patterns invoke divine order and proportion in a fallen, chaotic world as part of their service as representatives of Christ’s heavenly rule on earth. The built expression of theology is an open-ended exchange between faith, structure and purpose that culminates in the church as the architectural proclamation of the divine message. Anno Domini seeks to illustrate how each sanctum of worship presents itself as a microcosm of the renewed earth. This is what I mean when I say that the images are portraits of churches in their earthy dress – it is their individual, decorative languages that, in service to God, profess the renewed heaven and earth to come and they intercede with the metaphysical on behalf of the corporeal, existing in form and thus, in time, as heralds.

The passage from the declining west to the rising east remains the metaphorical undercurrent and this tension between form and formlessness finds fruition in the architectural rendering of the anticipation of eternity. A church gestures towards what lies beyond its adornments, or lack thereof, establishing a spiritual environment where the past actively participates in the present. These two often overlap in the way that temple traditions, the alter and the banquet table, step outside of time and place as architectural images that mediate heavenly realities to those on earth. Churches interpret the heavenly city of Jerusalem and project their interpretation of creation at the end of time through their evolving forms and styles. Ecclesiastical architecture terminates at infinity, towards the east and Christ’s return. It seeks to imagine the epitome of sacred geometry at the end of time and this intent flows through its history and remains inherent in its very existence – for in their own languages, churches are little projections of the second coming encased in a shell of materials that are entrusted to the larger, cosmic expression of inviting the joy of heaven onto earth.