06/15/2026
An exhibition curator creates meaning through intentional selection and juxtaposition — letting images and metaphors speak to one another, generating productive tension between them. Like a poet or a preacher, the curator’s task is to surface what no single work could reveal alone.
Biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine writes that parables “challenge us to investigate the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives — revealing the answers we have already known but refuse to acknowledge.” Like her approach to the parables, the current exhibit at Goose Creek Studio titled INFERNO seeks to disturb rather than reassure, placing our community in honest dialogue with its current situation. We trust one another to sit with difficulty and make meaning together.
In truth, this series is more improvisational than planned. The chaos of MAGA politics and the heresy of White Christian Nationalism is moving too quickly and too violently to allow for measured or dispassionate response. And so the creative imagination does what it has always done: answers with truth-telling, sacred story, metaphor, and symbol — making meaning at the edge of chaos.
Ken Templeton’s monumental painting anchors the show in Dante’s vision, mapping contemporary and historical figures onto an ancient moral landscape. Around it: a father called to sacrifice his son, and a mother whose son was offered up for many (Mary Grace Thul). The birth of the primordial sisters of divine vengeance (Patrick Ellis). Atonement and divine protection amid the violence of war (Bobby Fuller). A collective shrine holding grief and hope (Bobbie Brooks Crow). The ultimate cost of faithful witness and truth-telling (Daniel Kennedy).
These are dark and difficult images — and rightly so. But every one of these narratives ultimately points toward the same horizon: hope, and the reconciliation of the human spirit.
