Reflecting on devotions
The daily devotional, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX (Nov 8, 2024 – Jan 9, 2025).
Lawndale Art Center
November 8, 2024 - January 9, 2025
Studio visits are special when art makers and creators connect. It is a well-known fact that artists engage with materials differently. As a creator, my response to meeting with Roslyn Dupré and her work was genuine admiration and curiosity. What techniques do I see? What are the ingredients of her practice? What are her references?
Permission to touch the art, as you know, is a violation of the sacred. Roslyn graciously gave me permission to hold her devotionals. Precious, and thoughtfully made I immediately make a personal connection as I feel the subversive textures and arrangements at play; quilting and sewing—practices long associated with community, care, and memory—take on a new form as they intersect with the concept of deconstruction. Slowly, I notice that beyond the tactile, words and sentences become conceptual media, using words and sentences as part of the materials. Text woven, sewn, cut, and obscured with fibers change the agency, the structure, and the energy of the pages of the 1969 Novel, The Andromeda Strain; in which top scientists work feverishly to see how to contain a deadly contagion, sound familiar?
The choice of Michael Crichton’s, The Andromeda Strain, as a focal text is significant. The novel’s themes of containment, science, and the unknown align with the uncertainties experienced during the pandemic. Roslyn’s work, begun during this time, is a testament to resilience, devotion, and artistic inquiry. Her pieces, shaped by the repetitive use of naturally aged pages from a paperback edition, embodies the dedication and the process, fostering a deep sense of the personal exploration of rituals, obsessions, and compulsions. Each page follows its own structural logic summoning the unexpected and the reward of completion. The medium of fabric techniques, such as cutting, sewing, pleating, and reassembling, quilts together the narrative of a collective human experience defined by isolation, adaptation, and resilience.
The practice, carried out daily, emerges as a form of meditation that transcends the boundary between ritual and devotion, temporal and static. This begs me to question, are ritual and devotion inherently different?
By dismantling and reassembling its pages, Dupré transforms the material into a vessel for contemplation and quietude, shifting the narrative from a purely intellectual exercise into an intimate, embodied experience. Unlike prayer, which centers around
communication and supplication, Dupré’s devotionals are rooted in sensory engagement, embodied actions, and focused awareness.
The site-specific installation at Lawndale Art Center invites viewers to engage with her artistic process directly and physically. Walking the stairway up and down, one can sense the repetition mirrored in the steps themselves, an echo of the rhythmic action, which immerses the viewer in the tactile beauty of red and black delicately sewn threads. The mindfulness behind each piece’s formation and red framing conjures up memories of a chapel or sanctuary.
The viewer is prompted to reflect not only on the visual details, and red hues, but on the feel, and the associative qualities that the work evokes. Engagement extends beyond the walls, activating the senses and memories leading up to a place to reflect and kneel. The work challenges us to not just see but to feel, consider, and inhabit the space where language, repetition, and devotion intersect.
