I Believe I Know brings together revelatory works to explore
everyday experiences of transcendental awareness, exposing the
synchronicity of the divine and human. Through examinations of the
natural world, the cosmos, mythology, science, and dialect, I Believe I Know offers
a world unseen, though universally felt. This group exhibition, with
works in various mediums, brings together artists Sobia Ahmad, Maggie
Bjorklund, Centa Schumacher, and Elijah Burgher.
In his seminal tome on the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Expereince
(1902), William James scrutinizes the phenomenon of a mystical
experience, writing: “In mystic states we both become one with the
Absolute and we become aware of our oness”. I Believe I Know acts
as a crucible to this notion--presenting moments within nature,
religion, the solar system, and language which analyzes occurrences of
singularity in connection with the divine, leaving viewers with a varied
expression of wonder, ecstatic revelation, and humanness.
Sobia Ahmad and Maggie Bjorklund’s work are both rooted in their
personal experiences with religion, connecting their spiritual
sensibilities to the natural world to evoke an introspection that is
both interior and organic. Elijah Burgher and Centa Schumacher share a
scientific sentiment which employs language and experimentation as tools
to connect mythologies and hidden universes.
This exhibition was curated by Nina Friedman, Director, Tomayko
Foundation. Special thank you to Western Exhibitions, Chicago, and the
Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg for their collaboration.
About the artists:
Sobia Ahmad is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in public
health. Her practice explores the transcendental power of everyday
experiences, objects, and rituals through film, photography, and social
practice. She draws from non-western intellectual and spiritual
lexicons, specifically traditions of devotional poetry and oral
storytelling associated with Sufism. Often made in domestic and social
spaces, her process-based work engages in conversations about
relationality and reciprocity, embodied knowledge, alternative
pedagogies, material experimentation, and DIY ethos.
Maggie Bjorklund makes paintings that engage ambiguity and subtlety to
capture the spirit of things. Her process draws from memory, sensation,
and intuition, prioritizing a fluid, recipricol relationship with the
material. Manipulating thin layers of oil paint with scratchy, sweeping
brush strokes, vague forms unravel organically. The compositions float
between unrecognizable and familiar, capturing the subject’s tactile and
spiritual realities. Bjorklund is drawn to forms that communicate both
their earthly grit and their holiness--textures, colors, and elements
resembling plant matter, decomposing food, flesh, and angelic forms. The
work seeks to evoke the profundity in the small, raw retails of being
human.
Centa Schumacher is a lens-based artist working with photography, video,
and textiles. Her practice examines the transformative power of scale
and light, drawing from cosmology, deep space imagery, and western
mystery traditions. She uses manipulations of the photographic process,
including modified lenses, specialty filters, and double exposure, to
create images that exist parallel to--but do not overlap with--objective
reality.
Elijah Burgher uses painting, drawing, photography and printmaking,
working at the crossroads of representation and language, figuration and
abstraction, and the real and imagined. Drawing from mythology, ancient
history, the occult, and ritual magick, Burgher cultivates a highly
intimate code of sigils and emblems imbued with magical power to
investigate the personal and cultural dynamics of desire, love,
subcultural formation, and the history of abstraction. However, at the
core of this multifaceted practice, Burgher “aims to know whether an
artwork, any artwork, can possess meaning--to truly embody it somehow”.