I’m pleased to report that this week’s issue of The New Yorker (and online here) features a Woven Portrait commissioned by the magazine, to accompany Michael Pollan’s article “High Priests: What religious leaders learned from taking magic mushrooms” (also goes by the title “This Is Your Priest on Drugs”.
Art Director Supriya Kalidas contacted me early March of this year about the project and sent me an early draft of Pollan’s article, which outlines a university study in which psilocybin was administered to various religious leaders and their experiences were documented, as well as the lasting changes several of those leaders on a more personal front. I was struck how several of the subjects recounted experiencing the divine on an intimate, even sensual, level, and how at least a handful told of sensing God as a feminine presence.
I received this commission during my term as artist-in-residence at Cité internationale des arts (and below) in Paris, so I didn’t have access to my full-time studio in New York, nor my full assortment of tools and equipment, that I would ordinarily use to make a Woven Portrait. (I returned to New York at the end of April.) Discussing this issue and the article and general with Supriya, I suggested photographing the statue of Mary Magdalene that serves as part of the dramatic altarpiece of L’église de la Madeleine in Paris. (The array of statues that make up the altarpiece is collectively titled “The Ecstasy of Mary Magdalene”, which was completed by Carlo Marochetti in 1841.) To me the statue seems to depict a deeply spiritual experience though one that is not necessarily specifically Christian in nature. As an iconic female saint, Mary Magdalene also seemed a very appropriate subject.
(Additionally, I could see from photos available online that the lighting of the statue was very good, and so I wouldn’t have to attempt to make formal arrangements with the church to have a shoot with equipment and special access grants.)
While in Paris I had also given a lot of thought to Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc), a female patron saint of France, and the subject of a photoshoot I arranged and executed in January at Petit Palais, which will eventually result in a large Woven Portrait of Her. While I’m not a religious person, I find the female saints to be moving, and I appreciate the sincerity of their aura. France is really highly influenced by this line of thought, in my opinion and I found if helpful. The medieval thinkers, architects, and artists shaped the city in a way that makes sense to this part of my mind. In any case, this also contributed to my thinking regarding choosing a subject to photograph for this assignment.
In mid March I took the métro to La Madeleine and by chance arrived at the perfect moment: a church staffer was removing the chairs in front of the sanctuary to accommodate a concert that would be starting a little later in that afternoon. So I was able to move around and photograph the Mary Magdalene statue from various angles unencumbered. I took about 30 frames and then sat in the large Neoclassical church while the concert set up. I thought about Marie-Madeleine and Jeanne d’Arc, and about the silliness and ego of making art. I lit a votive candle before a small statue of Jeanne, and I thanked Her for what She did. To me, the truth of Her story is independent of whatever its actual facts might have been, and, anyway, how could we ever really know what they are? I wasn’t in the mood to listen to the concert (which was a high-school band from Minnesota touring France), so I left the church before they began.
Since I didn’t have access to my studio printer nor to the vellum I ordinarily use when I’m in New York, I outsourced the printing of three of the photos I took to a lab in Paris. I asked the lab to print on translucent polyester film (that they described as opalescent), which was one of the media they offered as an alternative to photo paper or watercolor paper, etc. The polyester prints were thicker than vellum so the cuts are a bit rougher than those made within my usual process. I cut three prints into 12mm-wide strips, as some models I had made indicated that they would scale down to the print size rather well after being photographed upon completion of the physical artwork.
The physical artwork was hardly translucent. The polyester’s thickness played a role in this. But also the medium simply wasn’t as translucent as vellum. And when three prints are woven together, the result was an almost complete opaqueness. Nonetheless, I did have a powerful Profoto B10 strobe with me in Paris. So, rather than using a lightbox to backlight the physical woven artwork in order to photograph it for publication, I positioned the strobe directly behind the artwork, pointing at the camera lens. Through this extreme form of backlighting, I managed to get enough light to pass through the physical artwork that the piece appears almost normally backlit.
However, because of these unique characteristics of the polyester film—its thickness and only slight translucency—this Woven Portrait of Mary Magdalene appears a bit hasher than usual, with more emphasis on the strips and their triaxial intersections. The piece misses much of what I’d plan for in the mockups in terms of precisely how the three photos of the subject would line up in the physical composite (again due to the unexpected thickness of the polyester film), and in terms of the contrast of the composite image (almost none of La Madeleine’s ornate interior is visible behind the statue. But I’m glad that, to me anyway, the image comes across as a generally spiritual subject (though on some level it is overtly a Christian one) set against a night sky. And I’m glad I got to spend this time with Marie-Madeleine of Paris, a city into which I fell deeper than expected.
