Art in the Convent: An Exhibition at St. Cecilia's

Saint Cecilia is an active Catholic church located in Greenpoint that has seen its struggles between changing demographics and fluctuating real estate markets. With an art community ever expanding in North Brooklyn, it was an inevitable collaboration for the patron saint of music to host an artist residency followed by a two-day exhibition inside the church.

Father James Krische approached artist Celia Rowlson-Hall after viewing a trailer of a film recorded in the church’s schoolyard, inviting her to organize a summer residency within the empty convent that previously housed nuns. Rowlson-Hall approached the art space Eyelevel BQE, where she exhibited the film, to collaborate and invite artists to create works influenced by their residency and showcase an exhibition at the end of summer.
Gabriela Alva Cal y Mayor, director of Eyelevel, worked with Celia to reach out to a community and selected close to twenty artists who were able to “realize work within a foreign working space, which often time means acknowledging a change of pace and direction in the art-making process and embracing what it means to collaborate with other artists within a specific location.” The resulting exhibition covered a wide range of mediums with paintings, photography, installations, videos and performances nearly occupying each room throughout the multi-story convent.

Chae Ohn’s cut out drawings of distressed figures was accompanied by the artist’s performance imitating the fictional characters, alluding to the children that once roamed in and out of the church and school. The convent gave artist Katie Klencheski the chance to “present a film that questions religious mythology and react to the space referencing the death and afterlife of the building through video.”

The highlight of the exhibition was a dance performance inside a chapel room within the convent. Directed by Jon Pratt and titled “The Playdate” it involved four dancers cast in white nightgowns placed next to the stained glass windows, stretching with slow and conscious movements inside the chapel. Not a single window or door was open inside, despite the stifling summer heat and it was a conscious decision in order to capture the sensation of a womb. Each dancer formed a procession billowing through the audience and repeated a ritualistic sequence of immersing their heads in water. A dancer clad in black rolled onto the stage with the start of a beat heavy electronic tune, moving with fast spastic undulations. The performance was accompanied by a projection displaying the words to a story about “the powerful bond of the female experience” told by the voice a young girl.

Pratt began to explore the space inside the convent and created a performance that was “a playful installation venerating the female in cosmology and the human experience. It’s also a commentary on the interconnectivity and interdependence of life and death and specifically represents the unique energy in the convent where so many pious women lived, died, worked, and supported one another.” The performance occupied various points of the viewer experience incorporating movement, music, narrative, and a hyper-conscious notion of one’s placement inside a nearly abandoned convent.

The exhibition echoed the convent’s history, leaving behind a trail for others to recreate and inhabit new forms of expression for both artists and devotees alike.