Beyond Boundaries: Questions to Ponder

This section presents two sets of questions, one applicable to the artists’ conceptions of boundaries and one concerning boundaries in the Bible.

Investigating Boundaries in the Artworks

Are there any physical, visible boundaries separating the artworks from viewers?

What might be some invisible boundaries keeping viewers from apprehending the artists’ intentions?

How might the dimensionality of the artworks serve as boundaries for either or both artist and viewer?

How might the titles of artworks serve as a type of boundary? Is that boundary expansive or diminishing?

Consider the artists’ use of –ing words — breaking through, finding, pausing, stretching — in their thematic titles. What do these words connote about the artists’ aims for this exhibition generally and for themselves as painters?

What boundaries do Beth Hudgins’s paintings “break through”? How do the inner and outer boundaries she references work in concert or at odds?

Is the space navigated by Linda Maldonado a fluid or fixed boundary? What does it mean to describe a form as “shapeless,” given the limitations of one’s own perceptions and imagination?

What might Kat Jamieson’s carefully crafted use of the horizon or Elise Ritter’s visualizations of transitional places tell us about our capacity to look at and see our world and confront the existential threats before us?

Elise Ritter describes in her Artist’s Statement how thresholds or transitions manifest in nature. What kinds of super-natural portals might draw us to thresholds of unexplored possibility?

How might abstraction, as explored by Deborah Taylor, open us to consider unconventional views or perspectives? Does abstraction enlarge or diminish the boundaries of our seeing?

Deborah Taylor titles her paintings with the first line of translated Japanese haiku, which are three-line, 17-syllable poems. How might language, particularly a translation, be a barrier or a tool of inspiration?

Are boundaries necessarily inherent in artistic compositions? Why or why not?

How might art help us to see and go beyond the boundaries of what is known, visible, representational, or empirical?

Investigating Boundaries in the Bible

Although “Beyond Boundaries” was not created specifically to address or interpret biblical events or spiritual questions, the exhibition’s broad subject and narrower themes, including geography and nature, portals and thresholds, the real and the imagined, do have relevance to discussions of the use and nature of boundaries in the Bible.

What are some of the many boundaries we encounter when listening to or reading the stories or narratives, the Psalms, the Proverbs, or other matter in the Bible?

We might consider, for example, the well-known story about the parting of the Red Sea, which appears not only in Exodus (13:17 – 14:31) but also is referenced in the Book of Joshua (e.g., 2:10, 4:23), in several Psalms (e.g., 77, 136), and elsewhere, placed within the context of a more expansive story about enslavement, oppression, the destruction of Egypt, which is bound by the land it encompasses, and the escape of the children of Israel. Its boundary is that larger narrative in which it is contained.

Another example is the book of Ruth in which geographic borders and the boundaries of gender, culture, and religion hold sway.

A third example is Acts 12, relating Peter’s imprisonment by King Herod, his escape with the miraculous aid of an angel who leads him to an iron gate “leading into the city. It opened to them of its own accord,” and his eventual arrival at the door of Mary, the threshold “where many were gathered together” and, with both joy and astonishment, receive him (v. 10-16).

Just as the exhibition’s artists concern themselves with responding visually to the conceptual questions their specific themes raise, so does the Bible offer possible answers to issues that even today concern us, to wit:

How do we understand and live within the physical boundaries we set for ourselves or that others impose on us?

What does it mean when boundaries are breached, resulting in displacement, loss of identity, exile?

Do we have an obligation to offer hospitality to those unlike us, to those on the outside of our cultural and social boundaries? To our transgressors and political enemies?

How does one go from being “the other” to being included? What if inclusion can be envisioned but never achieved?

In what ways can boundary-crossing become the means to transformation? Or, stated another way, how wide must our horizon be to tear down the boundaries that separate us?