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You Can Now Search the Image Website!
Finally, instead of scrolling through countless pages looking for that one tidbit of Image info, you can simply go to our website and click on our newly installed search engine. Thanks to the long hard efforts of our webmaster David Rither, the Image website is more accessible than ever. We encourage you to take a look, give it a try, and, while you're at it, check out our nifty menu bar, recently reorganized and chock full of new and improved drop-downs. Click here to begin searching. Happy hunting!
 Trinity Arts Conference: Innocence and Experience
It takes a lot of doing these days to "inspire creative individuals to meet high artistic standards, as well as the high standards of living a Christian life." We here at Image like to think of it as the mother of all group projects. So when we see our friends carrying the project forward with as much competence as the folks running the Trinity Arts Conference in Dallas, Texas this June, we can't help but put in a plug. Not dissimilar to our own annual Image Conference, the Trinity Arts Conference draws together artists of all ilks to ponder questions over the nature of religion and the arts. This year's conference theme is Innocence and Experience, drawing out the issue of what it means for the redeemed to make art in a complex, conflict-bound world: as Christ linked the holy with the mundane and corrupt, how do we, the creation, embody that paradox in our own work? Coordinators Kim Alexander and Mike Capps have compiled quite a roster of speakers and performers for the three-day conference, including poet Scott Cairns, superb singer/songwriter Kate Campbell, composer J.A.C. Redford, and our own Suzanne and Greg Wolfe. In addition to lectures, workshops, and exhibitions is the quirky Lip n' Slide, an open mic session in which attendees may present whatever they want of their own work-poetry, slides of artwork, prose-as long as they keep it under five minutes. In the glowing words of our editor, the Trinity Arts Conference "draws outstanding speakers and a diverse audience. The themes are carefully chosen and provide food for thought, long after the event is concluded. . This one's a keeper."
The Trinity Arts Conference will be held June 17-20 on the University of Dallas campus in Irving, Texas . To register or learn more about the conference, go to the Trinity Arts Conference website.
 Zbigniew Preisner
Born in Poland in 1955, Zbigniew Preisner first became interested in music during his university days. Soon after discovering the Krakow music scene in 1977, Preisner began composing for the renowned "Cellar Under the Ram" cabaret, and within two years was composing for Polish film and television. Preisner's big break followed shortly after his encounter with director Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colors Trilogy, The Decalogue); the two first collaborated on "Bez Konca/No End" (1984). Both Preisner and Kieslowski came to widespread acclaim in 1988 with the release of Kieslowski's masterpiece, The Decalogue , a ten-part series made for Polish television and based on the Ten Commandments. In each of the ten scores, Preisner's trademark emotive and haunting minimalism perfectly captured the uniqueness of Kieslowski's vision. After composing the wildly popular scores for Kieslowski's Three Colors Trilogy (1991-3), Preisner was commissioned to create the title work for the BBC's 26-part documentary on 20 th century history. Perhaps nothing, however, equals the musical impact of Requiem for My Friend (1998), Preisner's first full-length work specifically written for live performance and recording. The requiem is dedicated to the memory of Kieslowski, who died suddenly in 1996. Filled with liturgy (Agnus Dei, Sanctus), the music lifts the listener beyond temporal space and time. The work features the Varsovia Symphony, Varsov Chamber Choir, and Polish soprano Elzbieta Towarnicka. Of the piece, Preisner has said, "Once, we had a joint conception to create a concert telling a life story. The premiere was planned to take place on the Acropolis in Athens . It was intended to be a large event, a hybrid of a mystery play and an opera. Krzysztof Kieslowski would be the director, Krzysztof Piesiewicz was responsible for the script, and I was planning to compose the music." Currently, Preisner is working on three new scores, including music for the film, It's All About Love , starring Joaquin Phoenix, Claire Danes, and Sean Penn. A member of the French Film Academy, among Preisner's many awards are the Silver Bear from the Berlin Film Festival (1997), three consecutive awards for composer of the year by the Los Angeles Critics Association (1991, '92, '93), and the Award of the Minister of Foreign Affairs for outstanding achievements in the presentation of Polish culture abroad. Preisner lives in Poland and Switzerland.
To visit Zbigniew Preisner online, click here.
 Susan Savage: Bearing Witness
In the oncoming traffic of daily life, sometimes the simplest objects get lost to the eye. Out to the rescue, Susan Savage plucks one from the rush and polishes it up for us. In a new exhibit of paintings, Bearing Witness, Savage chooses a silver bowl for her centerpiece in a realist meditation on the evocative qualities of shape, reflection, and function. She lets those things speak for themselves, creating honest and rich renditions of bowls interacting with their various surroundings. More often than not, the paradox of faith can be heard in that quiet language: openness, waiting, and a muted wholeness mingle in the form of the bowl. Its chalice-like gleam, suggestive of sacrament, is balanced against the humble domestic possibility of preparing a meal. Offering itself to its surroundings in limpid reflections, each bowl in turn "alters its world" as the exuberant colors of fabrics, fruit, boxes, and ribbon become part of its beauty. There's nothing too fussy about these paintings. Like embodied spirit, the images unite the pure and lovely with the tangible and practical, one fulfilling the other. A thoughtful appreciation for the sacred in the ordinary-"stewardship of the image" as Savage describes her approach-suffices to draw out a delight that goes beyond sight, helping to keep our immediate vision from becoming "dull or trite or reductive" as it passes over the effects of life.
Bearing Witness will be on display in Santa Barbara at Westmont College 's Reynolds Gallery through March 6. Susan Savage is currently chair of the Westmont College Art Department and Associate Professor of Studio Art and Art Education. For more on the exhibit, click here.
 Northfork
Directed by Michael Polish
Are you wondering what to rent at the video store? Does your heart sink as you move past row after row of cinematic banality? Well, we've got a recommendation for you. Look for Northfork -there should be at least one or two copies at the store. It's an amazing film. Roger Ebert said of it: "There has never been a movie quite like 'Northfork,' but if you wanted to put it on a list, you would also include 'Days of Heaven' and 'Wings of Desire.' It has the desolate open spaces of the first, the angels of the second, and the feeling in both of deep sadness and pity. The movie is visionary and elegiac, more a fable than a story...." Set in the 1950s, the plot device at the heart of Northfork is the evacuation of a small Montana town, which will soon be inundated by water, thanks to a new hydro-electric dam. Evacuation teams travel to the last hold-outs, trying to persuade them to move on to higher ground. But this is just the plot device: the film is so much more, both on the cinematic/symbolic and the linguistic/metaphoric levels. You'd think a story with angels and a dying child would be relentlessly sentimental, but Northfork dances on that brink without every going over. The cumulative effect of the film is that of a long, complex-but-ultimately-simple parable. This one will cling to you after the credits roll. A small independent film (the third by brothers Michael and Mark Polish), Northfork attracted a number of major talents, including James Woods, Nick Nolte, Darryl Hannah, Anthony Edwards, and Peter Coyote.
Click here to go to the official website for the film.
Lydia McCauley and New Music from an Old World
From concert halls in Washington, Oregon, and most recently Trinity Cathedral in Sacramento, California, come Lydia McCauley and ensemble to give a candlelight concert in Seattle this month. A singer, songwriter, and pianist, McCauley began performing professionally in 1995 and formed her own independent music label, Brimstone Music, with her husband Kurt Scherer in 1996. The couple gathered a band of five talented musicians from an eclectic bouquet of musical influences-classical, jazz, Middle Eastern, Celtic-and began performing at various venues up and down the West Coast. McCauley's music, combining elements of folk and world music, defies categorization. Laced with medieval, Celtic, and Appalachian tones, her songs are best described as intoxicating, making a lissome journey through the past via the textured sounds of the ensemble's recorders, flutes, viola, pennywhistle, and mandolin. Beyond musical technique, McCauley's lyrics betray a poet's sensibility, good enough to earn Madeleine L'Engle's glowing praise: "I wouldn't have missed this for anything. The words were just as good as the music." This tour's program, New Music from an Old World , will feature a set list drawing from McCauley's four albums, as well as songs that have been preserved and passed down through fourteen centuries in regions throughout the world, including Galicia, Italy, Argentina, the British Isles, and Appalachia . Judging by her talent, it promises to be an evening of music that is at once joyful, poignant, and luminous.
New Music from on Old World comes to Seattle on Saturday, February 21, 7:30 p.m. at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church. Tickets, $12.00 general admission, are available through St. Andrew's at (206) 523-7476. Those of you on the East Coast can look forward to seeing Lydia McCauley and ensemble this fall. For more information on this concert or future dates, visit McCauley's website.
Continuing Art Exhibits
Burnt Offerings : The Art of Dawn Southworth
Delving into a world of discarded ironing board covers and the women who worked above them and inscribing images onto burnt pieces of vellum and parchment paper, mixed media artist Dawn Southworth illustrates in a series of works how natural phenomena, household objects, and geometric shapes may reclaim an intimate spiritual foundation. Her exhibit, titled Burnt Offerings, provokes an awakening of sensibilities. Southworth's pieces are dependent on the simplicity of familiar objects: paper, fabric, linen napkins, thread, anonymous photographs, scrap metal, and ceramic vines, which are assembled in a variety of "obsessive and repetitive methods": painting, drawing, stitching, burning, cobbling, tearing, and piercing. In the textures and lines of her craftwork, Southworth strives to relate the history of human labor and effort in a spiritual representation of the "common things that fingers have plied or caressed." She describes the " stained, stitched and distressed surfaces" of her pieces as "thin membranes of memory that seek to elicit meaning from a hybrid of assorted imagery." As if on skin, "the forms burnt and scarred into much of the work" represent a "violation of the body," but under the reshaping hand of the artist still leave room for healing and openings into the soul. A distinctive collection, Burnt Offerings lays out a sacramental possibility in the taut synthesis of the elements of craft and nature.
Burnt Offerings will be on display at The Gallery at Barrington Center for the Arts at Gordon College in Wenham, MA until February 18, 2004 . For more on the exhibit, please click here.
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