Invocation: Sentinels

Invocation: Sentinels is an evolving mixed-media portrait series made in partnership with women and non binary people in my life who embody powerful public-facing leadership without sacrificing the expansiveness of their own inner landscapes. Based on portraits captured of friends with their eyes closed in intimate moments of reflection or song, the compositions are collaged into a salvaged book about skyscrapers. The painted collages are then photographed, printed on canvas nearly 8.5 feet tall, and embellished with paint, gouache and fiber. 

Transforming images of iconic buildings–so often associated with typically male-coded values like ego, dominance and hierarchy–into the bodies of women and non binary people whose leadership centers collectivity and collaboration subverts the myth of the helpless damsel in the tower and creates monuments to feminine wisdom and other sacred knowledge passed down through the ages despite efforts to suppress it.

The headdresses are painted renderings of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s collars, flipped upside down to form crowns. If RBG’s collars are a symbol of vocation, a testament to her legacy and a call to action for us to make our mark on the world, then their inverse—literally the shape they make when they’re held upside down—is a crown, or an “in-vocation”: a summoning of our inner divinity, our rich and sometimes messy interior lives, and our expansive longings—which all too often get sacrificed or made invisible as we pursue our callings. 

The Sentinels remind us that our resistance can be lush. We are towering and soft.

We can embody our vocation and our invocation simultaneously.

And we are many, so we can take turns standing guard.

credits: video - Liz Ornitz, performances - Elana Bell, ArinMaya Lawrence, Susan Luss, members of The Resistance Revival Chorus, photo above: Erin Patrice O’Brien