CLICK ON TITLE ABOVE FOR ACCESS TO HI RES IMAGES PRESS RELEASE COPY: Saturday Nov 14th 4-8pm OPENING EXHIBITION AND ARTIST TALK Presenting ‘FAITH’ by Christopher Churchill At 6pm Christopher Churchill will be presenting an exclusive artist’s talk, along with Guest Curator Michael Itkoff of Daylight Magazine to the public. ON VIEW NOV 14th THROUGH JAN 10th Fri-Sunday noon-6pm Fovea Exhibitions 143 Main Street, Beacon NY 12508 Photograph left: “Elvis” by Christopher Churchill/Courtesy of Fovea Exhibitions Photographer Christopher Churchill shares his exploration into the different perspectives of faith in America photographed in beautiful 8” x10” black and white format. Every flavor and manifestation of faith is examined in this 5-year project, from mainstream religions, cult beliefs and culture, to aliens, Elvis, and nature. In producing this work Boston-based photographer Christopher Churchill traveled throughout the country without any specific route. He shot black and white film with an 8"x10" field camera. His reliance on unrelated events was his guide to different destinations and encounters, placing faith in this process. I began this project because of a genuine curiosity about religious faith from a personal and societal perspective. I have always had a deep faith in the interconnectivity of the world, a faith instilled in me from an early age and one validated, at least for me, many times over the course of my life. Sometimes this faith was validated in tragedy, as it was with the death of my father and in the tearful memories of a Hutterite great-grandmother remembering the premature death of her son; sometimes in joy, as it was with the birth of my daughter and in a dying Mississippi woman’s long-delayed and finally fulfilled wish to see a white Christmas, and at other times in subtle observations of people and nature. There seems to be an order in life, an order beyond our control, but I’ve never felt that organized religion was the way for me to manifest my belief in this order. The intense faith organized religion fosters in its adherents has always intrigued me, however, and I knew that there must be a middle ground, a place where, through the stories of others, I could gain a better understanding of the universal human need to be part of something greater than oneself. Early on I realized that I needed to set some basic guidelines for this project. The first principle was to plan nothing. Every trip would be to a particular region, but there would be no itinerary, no planned stops. This project was not an academic study, but rather the record of one person’s experiences and encounters with faith in America. Second, I would record the stories of the people I met along the way, allowing them to create the book’s content. Third, I would travel with faith. Not faith in a conventional religious sense, not faith as it is usually understood, but faith that this random sample would, in the end, make sense, that at the end of the project I would understand something that I did not understand at the beginning. I traveled with nothing but this faith and the kindness of others to guide me, a faith that connected me to others in a way I would never have achieved on my own. Along the way I met with crimson-robed monks in Wisconsin, a Mennonite pastor in Pennsylvania, and learned of the tragic death of a good friend in Maine. Through it all, I learned that faith helps us endure and understand the long perspective of time, helps us understand why the innocent suffer, and how events in the short term, however painful they are, may be the outward manifestation of something greater redirecting the course of our lives. When my grandfather died, my father taught me that a person’s soul lives on even after the physical body has moldered away, that our lives are part of a greater chain of being whether we choose to acknowledge this or not. This, I think, is the essence of the human experience, this knowledge that we are all connected, every person to every other person. To experience this connection is something we all seek.