Fig. 27 Ipomoea batatas 'Blackie' and Tradescantia pallida, Louisville, KY - Limited Edition 1 of 3 Photograph

I want people to think of plants as living, photographic prints of the Divine. Throughout texts and verbal stories worldwide the notion of light as the actual physical manifestation of Divinity is a continuous thread that binds the human experience of the world. Plants are uniquely positioned as intercessors of this light, acting in a saintly or even christlike fashion by fixing physical light into their physical form through the energetic process of Photosynthesis. Riffing off of art history, I have been using the conventions common to Medieval and Renaissance paintings to depict the sacred and holy - the aureole - using the earthly substance which cross culturally we have come to associate with the Divine - gold. These images do the pieces no justice. The haloes catch light in ways that photography fails to demonstrate, and most people hover in front of the images for quite some time at the openings. Anyone who is interested, contact me and I can send additional images to give a sense of scale, or check out my instagram . ____ In 1917, the German theologian Rudolf Otto developed the concept of the “numinous” in order to capture the affective surplus of the “holy” that could not be limited to the realm of the ethical or rational. The numinous is a mental state “perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other” and escapes any proscriptive definition as a result. Otto characterizes the spontaneous and objective experience of the numinous as a “creature-feeling,” an affect “of self-abasement into nothingness before an overpowering absolute might.” [Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (Oxford University Press, 1923), 10 ] This conception of the numinous shows the contingency of human being by way of the divine’s sublime magnitude. Humans recognize the holy in their own insignificance. This beautifully conventional formulation excludes as much as it seeks to explain. Otto’s feeling of the numinous constrains the holy to the power structures of the world while it attempts to feel beyond them. But what if the numinous were reversed or inverted? Can the numinous be made relational and collaborative in the exceptional ordinariness of the mundane or quotidian? How can the numinous emerge in the queer, the vegetal, and the potentials that dwell between the two? These are the questions that emerge from Whit Forrester’s humbly sublime portraits of houseplants. The artist characterizes his process of gold-leafing as an act of sanctifying the ordinary. His almost monumental photographs seek to inspire the numinous by revealing the profound interconnectedness of the natural world. These interwoven networks of being call into question any distinction between object and subject, particularly when the affective surplus of the holy unexpectedly unfurls from the houseplants that surround us. Forrester expands upon the photosynthetic translation of light into energy as a numinous act in this installation. He constructs an ephemeral environment to enfold the spectator in this divinely ordinary encounter. The gallery is a reflective space in which the accessible materiality of the everyday uses natural light to illuminate these sainted houseplants captured by the camera lens. It is a space to contemplate the queer animal-vegetal relations so often overlooked, ignored, or taken for granted as, in fact, deeply spiritual. Forrester’s photographic and installation works expand and queer Otto’s terms of the numinous by allowing us to dwell in sanctity of the plants we call home.