ritual
May 17, 2021-September 5, 2021, Intersect Arts Center, St. Louis, MO
Intersect Arts Gallery features 117 works by 44 artists that explore the phenomenon of ritual. From the sacred to the mundane we invite you into contemplations of rituals that may be personal or corporate, ancient or contemporary, organized or completely of the artist’s invention, spiritual, religious, political or of daily life. You will glimpse rituals that reference ideas of healing, connection, lament, promise, and protection. You will see rituals of repentance, resistance, and routine.
Rituals feel superfluous in many ways. They are not necessarily necessary. You can eat lunch without ceremony, and it will still nourish your body. Rituals can be practiced with a high degree of intentionality, or they may be absorbed into daily life by rote, carried on from the traditions of past generations. You may have rituals so ingrained in you from birth that you hardly recognize them as separate from your DNA. You may have developed new rituals during this time of Covid. You may love your rituals, you may loathe some of your rituals, you may roll your eyes at some forms of ritualization by others.
These things that we do, these rituals, with ceremony and with repetition, they are not just habits. Rituals are the embellishment of necessity, the soul of why we do what we do. They are the distillation of a universe of intricate and expansive ideas often surpassing comprehension into a tangible, enact-able structure of gestures, words, and objects. They not only nourish our bodies, but are vital to nourish our minds and our souls. Our thriving does depend on them, whether we are conscious of it or not.
