Art 365: Eyakem Gulilat by Kirsten Olds
Eyakem Gulilat, Norman, Untitled (From the Collaborative Self Series), Archival pigment ink print, 24” x 50”
This is the third in a series of articles profiling artists selected for Art 365 2014, an Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition (OVAC) program that supports five artists’ innovative projects over the course of a year. Projects are nurtured in consultation with guest curator Raechell Smith, Director of the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, and culminate in the Art 365 exhibition, which opens February 28, 2014 at [Artspace] at Untitled in Oklahoma City and then travels to the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa’s Hardesty Arts Center in Tulsa in May 2014. For more about the exhibition, visit www.Art365.org. “At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation,” Martin Luther King, Jr., observed to students and faculty at Western Michigan University in 1963. This idea, of how churches can structure and picture American society, captivated Norman-based artist Eyakem Gulilat, and it inspired his project for Art 365. What do our churches, and their environs, look like on Sunday morning, the traditional day of Christian worship? What can they tell us about ourselves, our patterns, and relationships? To explore these questions Gulilat has taken to the skies on Sunday mornings, capturing aerial views of free-standing churches of different denominations in Oklahoma City and Tulsa (and he hopes to shoot other locations throughout the state, maybe one day documenting more than four thousand). These are no mere Google Earth satellite images, though. Carefully composed, with full attention to formal qualities,
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the photographs belie their origins in an aircraft—helicopter and small airplane— moving between 50 and 80 mph. The bird’s-eye view, a common landscape perspective in centuries past, connotes the all-seeing eye of God, a fitting association for a project exploring religion and society. At the same time the overhead position conveys the seeming objectivity of science, as well as hints of Big Brother surveillance. These different associations shape our understanding of the resulting pictures: we notice spatial relationships that are less evident from the ground. In one image an undeveloped, grassy terrain vague segregates the church building from a subdivision of perfectly planned homes. Another reveals additions to the church over time, the building itself growing with its congregation. Such a vantage point offers us a position on the outside, the ability to examine a larger whole we are not privy to in our daily experience with these spaces. As the artist explains, “Unless we back away and look at ourselves, we’ll be blind to look inside.”
It is the signs of people that most interest Gulilat. Folks gussied up in their finest heading into services; the flash of someone’s t-shirt on a playground; a driver of a humble pick-up truck idling on the road—these are the details that help clue us in to the nature of these communities. Some reveal signs of thriving neighborhoods with churches at the center; in others, the church itself becomes a campus, a neighborhood unto itself, almost. Yet how we interpret these observations is up to us, the viewers. The photos and their details are explorations; if we attend to the various dynamics of site and social cues, they give us much to consider about individual and communal expressions of worship. A self-described non-denominational Christian and the son of a retired pastor, Gulilat has explored notions of religion and ritual in other photographic series. In his ongoing Memories series, the artist re-enacts moments from his boyhood in Ethiopia. Undertaking his grandfather’s morning prayer, or bent over the bed in the humblest