NEW YORK, NY.- In February 2022, new to New York and seeking bleeding-edge culture, I found myself at a poetry reading at KGB, an Eastern Bloc-themed bar in the East Village. The night’s second reader took the stage, a solid black crucifix tattooed on her sternum, and read the King James Version of Lamentations, flawlessly and intensely, from start to finish. “And thou hast removed my soul far off from peace,” she intoned. “I forgat prosperity.”
I had spent my adult life distancing myself from a Protestant upbringing. The last avant-garde idea I expected to find in New York City was Christianity. Yet Christian symbolism was everywhere, in good faith and bad. So-called Trad-Cath influencers swooned for Jesus on social media, a trend that may have peaked in August 2022 when an essay published in The New York Times wondered if Catholicism’s coolness could revitalize the church.
In the art galleries, the crucifixes and reliquaries, the angels and demons, felt less like fast fashion. Young artists like Chris Lloyd, Brian Oakes, Rachel Rossin and Harris Rosenblum are among those taking spiritual matters seriously. They mingle not at church but at downtown New York galleries and project spaces, especially Blade Study, Sara’s and Dunkunsthalle. And they’re tech savvy, freely mixing 3D printing, electronics, digital animation and artificial intelligence.
But what unites them more than any particular medium is a return to big questions: Why are we here? Whom should we serve? In response, they’re building iconography from pieces of other belief systems: some role-playing games and anime, some major religions.
These artists grew up in an alienating time. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the 2008 financial crash, tumultuous Trumpian politics and waves of protests all helped dislodge the guiding social narratives of previous generations. COVID-19 confronted even 20-somethings with mortality and shook the old order.
And the opaqueness of the technology we have come to depend on for everything stirs age-old superstitions. Kate Crawford, a professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism who researches AI, compares some developers of artificial intelligence to a “technical priest class.” Certain leaders in the industry, she said, “genuinely believe that they’re creating an artificial sentience that will be godlike.” But, she added, the question is “Are they building a vengeful god or a beneficent god?”
No wonder artists are seeking their own narratives and communities.
Algorithms as Destiny
On a hot, garbage-scented day in April, Chris Lloyd spread an artwork on the floor of his studio in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn: a tall, intricate collage depicting a vicious snake rising from licking fire, laser cut from black metal bands’ T-shirts. The serpent wound through hand-drawn medieval scenes reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts, like angels and demons fighting over a soul, or a brooding Satan. Scratchy flames, rendered by a computerized plotter modified to hold a pen, ran along each edge.
Nearby, in a free-standing wood shadow box rising chest high, was a lacelike drawing of the gates of hell.
Both works appeared in Lloyd’s 2022 show at Entrance Gallery on the Lower East Side. He described the installation as a choice between good and evil: The street level of the gallery was paradise, with collages in gemlike greens and blues; the basement was fiery red perdition.
Lloyd, 29, finds his imagery online, then stitches it together into loosely remembered Bible stories. He said he was driven to recollect the illustrations and memes that he grew up with in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his parents ran one of the few Black churches in the state.
He showed me a collage that included a corny Christian poem, “Footprints in the Sand.” The mixed-media works on canvas in his 2024 show at Spy Projects in Los Angeles broadened the spiritual purview to include, for example, a psychedelic chakra diagram flanked with imagery from LSD blotters.
Lloyd told me that “the algorithm” could feel omniscient, like predestination — like when you’re served an Instagram ad for fast food before you know you’re hungry. Likewise, the way we rely on Google to navigate the internet, without understanding how it ranks results, tests the concept of free will.
Similarly, Brian Oakes compares the search for divinity to surrealist explorations of chance.
Oakes, 28, drew attention for electronic chandeliers made from jagged, batlike circuit boards studded with LEDs and filigreed with wires. At random intervals, the sculptures record audio snippets of their surroundings and play them back.
The hanging sculptures cover the ceiling of his studio in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Some people think they evoke Old Testament descriptions of angels as burning wheels or flurries of wings and eyes, which are illustrated as alternately fearsome and awkward in the Biblically Accurate Angel meme.
Oakes was raised Roman Catholic but isn’t religious. If he meant the sculptures as angels, he said, it’s as harbingers. He liked the idea of an arbitrary sound bite becoming “a divine message, or a message that brings with it meaning or great importance.”
Ian Glover and Brooke Nichols, the dealers behind the gallery Blade Study, included Oakes’ angels in a 2023 show, “Epiphany.” They told me they spent so much time with Oakes’ chandeliers that they started to imagine patterns in what they would record and replay — in particular, laughter.
Oakes’ newest kinetic sculptures also suggest meaning in randomness, with subtler iconography. He showed me a work in progress, in which a robotic forklift rearranges small sculptures on tiny pallets for its own inscrutable reasons. There’s a model house and a pile of pennies punched with holes the shape of angels.
The Escapism Problem
“I think that art-making is intrinsically spiritual,” said Rachel Rossin, 37. “And that will get me in trouble.” The word “spirituality,” she said, comes with a lot of baggage. It rings of escapism, the sense that you avoid the material world and its problems. But the same could be said of video games and virtual reality: “Religion and technology hold hands through that as well,” she said.
Her definition of spirituality is more pragmatic: “how you align yourself to connection or meaning.”
I met Rossin in her studio in the financial district, upstairs from Dunkunsthalle, the gallery she co-founded in a closed Dunkin’ store. (The first show there, curated by her friend Joey Frank, featured an angelic Oakes chandelier.)
Like Oakes, Rossin rarely uses obvious symbolism in her digital models, animations and semiabstract paintings.
A 2023 show, however — “SCRY” at Magenta Plains in Chinatown — was styled like an electrified chapel, with paintings of “mechs,” robotic suits of anime armor and childish angels hung in an apse-like space. A screen on the ceiling played animations of anatomical models and ethereal beings in the colors of a heat map, like a digital fresco.
Those works spoke to “a pretty violent childhood,” she said. She was raised in Florida “at the corner of Military and Gun Club Road,” in a strict evangelical family.
As it does for many, spirituality offered safety. Gradually, so did the internet and gaming. And art. “I don’t believe in a Judeo-Christian God,” Rossin said; she holds “a synthesis of different religions or belief systems.” Making art, she added, is the only thing that gives her what she seeks at church.
The mechs in those paintings, she said, spoke to her interest in hybrid human forms. That includes sticking wings on people to make angels, but also the powered exoskeletons being developed by companies like LG to increase the productivity of warehouse workers.
Having so much information available on the internet, with cascades of links and references, is a bit like being a cyborg — part machine. “I love this about the time that we live in,” Rossin said, “but there’s annotations on top of annotations.” The trade-off, she added: It’s impossible to know what anyone truly believes. “It’s really hard to just be sincere.”
Divine Materialism
I met Harris Rosenblum for beers at a skate-rink-themed bar in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He observed that the hectic neon atmosphere was made, by human beings, from materials pulled from the ground.
Rosenblum, 29, wears the round eyeglasses of an alchemist. “I believe that there is a divine order to reality,” he said.
Rosenblum’s 2022 show at Blade Study consisted of 3D-printed and hand-fashioned “relics” related to a digital plague that, because of a glitch, ravaged World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game.
His show “Inorganic Demons” at Sara’s in 2023, also in Chinatown, referred to a striking mix of mythologies and belief systems: A sculpture of a lamb, for example, was made from fleshy resin. An illuminated manuscript generated by AI was printed on goatskin.
The “bizarre mystical versions of Christianity” that thrive in parts of the United States, such as in Aurora, Colorado, where he grew up, inspired his work; so did internet subcultures.
Several older pieces, like a foam sword modeled on a blade from World of Warcraft, list a “relic of the true cross” among their materials.
“What I bought on Etsy was a third-class relic of the true cross,” Rosenblum said — essentially a bottle of oil that had touched a shard of wood supposedly from Jesus’ crucifixion. “There’s this infinite transmutability to this relic,” he said. “Whatever we mean by relic of the true cross, this is a real relic of the true cross.”
Rosenblum is moving away from overt symbolism in his art. But his underlying concern is the same. One new project involves fashioning a machine screw, from scratch — a kind of crafting exercise that evokes medieval guilds and speaks to the underlying order of objects.
Good art shows “the intrinsic beauty in reality,” he said. “It’s the same thing that the Hagia Sophia does.”
Rosenblum connected me with his friend Dianna Lucia Dragonetti, whose recital of Lamentations had provoked my seeking. The black dress she wore to our interview framed her tattoo.
I asked about the reading at KGB. “It was an absurd thing to do,” she said. “And that made it transgressive or something.”
Dragonetti is an opera singer with a beguiling contralto. She rarely performs in public, she said, but she has sung solos at Dunkunsthalle, during the show curated by Joey Frank; at Rosenblum’s Blade Study show; and in the stairwell leading to Sara’s.
Before we met, she sent recent recordings of herself singing Dalila’s aria from “Samson et Dalila” (1877) by Camille Saint-Saëns. “Life and death, eternity, everything is in that phrase, and in how I express that phrase,” she said of one nine-second clip. “It’s beyond me how I was given that gift of expression.”
She acknowledged that people were often surprised, as I was, by her naked devotion to God and sense of divine inspiration.
Of course, she said, “for most of human history, that was a totally mundane reason for a person to be an artist.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
