Publications
Burning Bush
Burning BushKevin Schmidt/ Juan Gaitan
Designed by Robin Mitchell
Artspeak, 2005
ISBN 0-921394-53-5
5.8" x 9.4" / 32 pp / 20 colour images
Speculating on belief, Kevin Schmidt's video Burning Bush and Juan Gaitan's essay Doubt as an Optical Illusion, instigate discussions around faith, disbelief and humanity. Schmidt's extended landscape portrait of a burning bush intermingles religious, political and art historical mythologies to point to the languages, both visual and textual, of doctrine. In the staging of a miracle, the bush assumes a kind of faltering breath, a sense of possibility. If the bush is indeed "a sleeping life," Burning Bush awakens in the viewer the prospect of humanistic consideration. Schmidt's and Gaitan's investigations are pertinent given the ongoing disasters reported on daily: New Orleans' sinking, Iraq's continued bedlam, environmental disaster, terror. In this climate of physical and philosophical crisis, miracles gain possibility, potency and even efficacy. They can ask us to suspend our (dis)belief and bear witness to the world. Burning Bush extends an invitation to meditate on aesthetic, cultural, political and spiritual references, offering the potential of sublime wonder and growth.
Burning Bush was published on the occasion of the exhibition by the same name held at Artspeak, September 9 to October 15, 2005.
Kevin Schmidt is a Vancouver based multi-disciplinary artist, working primarily in photography and video. Select recent exhibitions include Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Ziehersmith, New York; Edmonton Art Gallery; Blackwood Gallery, Missassauga; McKenzie Art Gallery, Regina; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver.
Juan A. Gaitán is a Vancouver based art historian. His research interests are the Americas in the post-War period, religious monuments in the early middle ages, and contemporary art. He is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of British Columbia.
Price $17.00
