AN online presentation

Dreaming Into the Cosmos
A site-specific art installation
Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA
November 2022

In 2022, Johanna Baruch was invited to create a site-specific art installation for Grace Cathedral and Veriditas’ Women’s Dream Quest.  Johanna visited the Cathedral often, allowing herself to be uplifted into its soaring spaces, feeling the ceiling’s support by the massive columns, and the ground beneath her feet by the labyrinth below.  She began to have a vision.  She imagined her work, whose imagery is inspired by the astonishing photographs of deep space taken by the Hubble and the new James Webb Space Telescopes, also journeying upward into the expansive spaciousness of Grace, embraced and framed between its solid columns while also holding witness to the labyrinth’s path.  What unfolded was an elaborate plan to reproduce her paintings on giant canvases, engineer their suspension from the upper clearstory levels and then mount them with a professional team of art installers. 

 

Following is a brief tour of the final art installation.  What cannot be conveyed here, but imagined, is the full sensory experience of the canvases becoming an integral part of the Cathedral’s cavernous spaciousness, their brilliant colors and forms in dynamic conversation with the light streaming in through the beautiful stained glass windows as the sun traveled across overhead, her images playing their part in the stories told by the painted murals on the walls behind them, holding the silences along with the hushed whispers of the visitors, and opening vistas as if presenting floating doorways out into the cosmos and inward into people’s own imaginations as they stood gazing, or walking in meditation on the labyrinth below.

Within the soaring spaces of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, Johanna Baruch suspended 12 giant canvas prints between the 100’ high columns.  The images, part of Johanna’s Cosmos Series paintings, are inspired by the magnificent photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.   Visitors were invited to experience the cosmos, and journey into their own imaginations, held within the safety of the Cathedral and into the paintings’ images sweeping forms, colors and movement.

 
 

The color and movement of the images resonated with the Cathedral’s architecture and design, holding dynamic conversations with the murals on the walls and the stained glass windows behind them.  In certain light, it was as if the paintings’ canvases themselves were windows through which shone their own colors onto the Cathedral’s floor.

 
 

As the sun moved across the sky, colors shifted through the illuminated stained glass windows and shone upon the canvases themselves.  In an unexpected and beautiful collaboration, the sun added its own brilliant brushstrokes to the artworks.

 
 
 

In a quiet corner, hung next to the mysterious painting of Mary Magdalene was an offering and a compelling dialogue of color and form between them, Johanna’s image invited visitors to meditate while traveling through their own inner landscapes.

 
 

Throughout, the labyrinth welcomed visitors to explore the many layered meanings of their individual paths, while sharing in the collective embrace of our universal experience.

 
 

The installation presented a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional and timeless experience, propelling people into the heights of the cosmos, while inviting them into quiet contemplation of their own inner journeys.