Opening Celebration

Performance by Selah Gospel Choir at 5:30 pm

Bridge Projects invites you to the opening celebration for Here After, our group exhibition featuring thirty-seven artists who explore the idea of paradise—both how it has been pursued on earth across history, and how it is imagined after life. Midway through the opening, Selah Gospel Choir will reprise a series of songs related to the universal hope for justice and grace in this life and in the life of the world to come.

In Here After, works like William Kurelek’s Farm Boy’s Dream of Heaven (1963) envision an eschatological beyond in figurative form, while works by Bonita Helmer and Zarah Hussain do so in more abstract terms. Andrea Büttner and Claire Curneen’s works point to a vulnerable, sensual bodiliness, embedded in the surface of the world where all things come to pass. There is a land beyond the river by Gyun Hur and Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s The Boat People make space for remembrance of those who have passed, while Afruz Amighi, Mercedes Dorame, and Charwei Tsai position the viewer between worlds, feet firmly planted on the ground yet gazing at the glory and wonder of the beyond. In his installation Skywall, David Wallace Haskins plunges into the boundless sky and its immaterial light, letting all the expansive beauty grip the viewer. Kate Ingold intones the rhythmic mantras of what the divine is not with minute stitches, employing almost impossible patience to painstakingly outline absence. Kris Martin lodges small contradictions in the mind, which, in time, grow to be distracting puzzles—the candle in a sealed box, whose existence cannot be proven with the senses. And Tatsuo Miyajima uses digital counters to display the uncountable, unending dimension of existence.

Featured artists: Alberto Aguilar, Farkhondeh Ahmadzadeh, Lynn Aldrich, Afruz Amighi, Andrea Büttner, Jeni Spota C., Mandy Cano Villalobos, Claire Curneen, Mercedes Dorame, James Elaine, Maja Lisa Engelhardt, Belu-Simion Fainaru, Amir H. Fallah, vanessa german, Alastair Gordon, David Wallace Haskins, Bonita Helmer, Gyun Hur, Zarah Hussain, Kate Ingold, William Kurelek, Olga Lah, Beth Lipman, Greg Lookerse, Regina Mamou, Kris Martin, Tatsuo Miyajima, Jordan Nassar, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Master Shen-Long, Stanley Spencer, Linnéa Gabriella Spransy, Charwei Tsai, William Villalongo, Patty Wickman, James Wines, and Xu Zhen ®.