Former MCPA founding member Ali Beyer joins our exhibition at the Vine Arts Center as a Guest Artist with a video work entitled Within.
In her own words:
"Within is a piece based on my experiences growing up in a household where my mother was a Wiccan High Priestess.
Growing up in a family that followed a Pagan tradition and did so publicly in the 1980s is somewhat of a unique perspective and I realize that when I choose to speak from this space.
Combining the visuals of the hands performing ritual movements with the sound piece that incorporates text about my childhood allows this work to transcend the spiritual and shows the magic in everyday life as well as clearly showing the passing on of this cultural tradition.
This sacredness within the mundane is a central Pagan theme.... Respected contemporary Pagan author, Starhawk, notes this rooting in the everyday that Pagan traditions maintain in her book Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery:
'Yet the mysteries are made up of the stuff of everyday life. They center on the most common of human experiences: birth, death, love, nurture, challenge, passion, time. We make mystery ourselves out of our everyday lives, and so we must discover the mysteries that will take us to the heart of the world. The terrain of the mysteries is the ordinary. To seek out mystery, we don’t have to go anywhere. We must simply change our perception, our description, our consciousness of where we are.”
Since my mother passed away a decade ago I feel a responsibility to give people a space to remember her and I seem to be doing that with pieces of visual art such as this. In addition this passing down of a familial tradition echoes the passing down of Paganism from generation to generation – literally from the ancient realms to these more contemporary times."
