on rapture
I have been thinking about making this work for about four years. It is one of the most involved projects I have ever done.Essentially, the Rapture is a moment when God calls all of the faithful to him in the sky. The response is bodily, that is people will be snatched out of their clothes in an instant and go off to join Jesus in Paradise. There will be piles of clothing on the street. Planes and cars will crash because their pilots and drivers have disappeared. The saved will go on to glory - the sinners will be left behind in a world of tribulation and in the absence of the faithful.
Being who I am, I am not going to be raptured according to this cosmology. It is a world view that depends on the sinner in order to create the saved. This is nothing new: you need "blacks" to create whiteness; you need the East to create the West: you need sinners to have the saved. You need the other to understand the self. And the other is always the repository for the obscene desire of the self. You have to punish the other for what you want.
So what does rapture look like? How does it feel to be carried away? Is Ted Haggard going to heaven? If so, then what about Mike Jones?
The prints are named after those who have gone on to glory in the presence of the sinners that helped them get there.
This work would never have been remotely possible without the assistance and vision of Eun Sook Lee at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia. She is without a doubt the force that made an idea concrete.
