Artist’s Statement

I stumbled into making crosses almost 30 years ago.  I made a piece that many people saw as a cruciform image, though that was not my intention.  But the resemblance was clear, and started me thinking about crosses and their imagery.  In the early 1980s I embarked on a series.  Two crosses from that initial series, Florentine and Selma Cross are exhibited here.  My goal was to make useful liturgical objects for the church.

If the purpose of the cross is symbolic, the question is “what is being symbolized?”  In my experience the answer found in too many church crosses is, “not much.”  Their conventionality precludes contemplation.  Their ubiquity and repetition make them almost invisible, and possibilities for spiritual reflection are muffled by a barely audible drone.  So after that initial series, I resolved to treat the cross as sculpture, and to draw upon the forms, materials, and ideas that moved me as an artist.  My goal was to begin to reconstitute this basic Christian symbol.

The sculpture I love has a strong material presence, a visible sense of the processes involved in making, and simple forms originating in nature or utilitarian objects.  The imagery of this kind of art is not divorced from its physical embodiment.  By contrast, we may easily forget that television imagery depends on a stream of electrons, since we are so taken with the projected characters and stories.  But the sculptural imagery I prefer requires some interaction of form, material, and process.

This interaction can be readily seen in the Salt Lick Cross, which was assembled, and then taken to a pasture where cattle used it.  The cattle modified the block forms of the salt as they drew sustenance from it, and the rich rust patina of the steel background was the result of corrosion from the cow’s saliva.  Both the material and the process join with the cross form to create an image with specific, suggestive content.

Crosses like Law and Grace and Broken Tablet use paired stones which are often associated with the law.  But they also resemble instruments or tools, and some people see them as weapons, or containing the potential for violence.  It is important, I think, to recall that the cross was an instrument of torture, and whatever we derive from its image is inextricably linked to that.

Initially I made a sharp distinction between a cross and a crucifix, but over time that historically rooted difference blurred in my mind.  Both Burnt Cross and In the Shadow have figural form.  While the Protestant preference for the empty cross is understandable in the light of history, I do not believe we can finally separate the flesh and blood of Christ from its painful union with the cross.

I have included one piece, Taste and See, that is obviously not a cross.  The title comes from Psalm 34: 8.  The reconstitution of the cross is not just about new images for faith or art.  It is something that can be tasted.  The honey in this piece, Tupelo Honey, is the one kind of honey that never crystallizes.  It always stays fresh.

Theodore Prescott
May 30, 2006

Curator’s Statement

I first met Ted Prescott and admired his work about fourteen years ago, when I had a solo exhibition at the Aughinbach Gallery at Messiah College. Since then, each time our paths have crossed, I have been reminded of the power and subtlety of his sculptural meditations on the connections between physical matter and Christian faith. Juxtaposing stone, wood, metal, and various found objects, Prescott invites us to consider the meanings of these materials in our own metaphoric vocabularies as he reconstitutes them into the form of the cross.

In his recent book, The Strange Case of Religion in Contemporary Art, critic and historian James Elkins argues that the project of modernism in art is antithetical to religion in general, and to Christianity in particular, and wonders if it is possible to bridge the gulf between the religious community and contemporary notions about art. Theodore Prescott’s work addresses that question with both a “yes” and a “no.” The affirmative answer lies in his confident mastery of a visual idiom that is spare, suggestive rather than narrative, and revealing of material and process. The negative reply is less in the works themselves than in an art world culture that expects any exploration of religious matters to be idiosyncratic, disapproving, ironic, or all three. In Prescott’s work, the traditional Christian meanings of the cross are extended, rather than questioned; deepened, rather than rejected. Each of the crosses in this show asks, first, “what is a cross?”; and then answers with a form that is both surprising and elegant.

In addition to his own artistic production, Theodore Prescott is a thoughtful critic of other artists’ work; a former president and founder of CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts); and the editor of A Broken Beauty, a group of essays on art and the notion of human beauty as well as the catalogue for the exhibition “A Broken Beauty: Figuration, Narrative, and the Transcendent in North American Art,” which opened in November, 2005 at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California. He has been teaching sculpture at Messiah College since 1980, where he has been honored as “Distinguished Professor” since 2001. Prescott’s works may be found in many private and public collections, including the Cincinnati Museum of Art; Armand Hammer Museum of Art at UCLA; and the Vatican Museum of Contemporary Religious Art.

It is with profound pleasure that I present the works of Theodore Prescott to the Wesley community. Echoing the title of one of the works in this exhibition, I hope that you will not only taste and see, but that you will be deeply fed by the union of spirit and matter that is The Reconstituted Cross.

Deborah Sokolove
Curator, Dadian Gallery