Ritual Encounters

In Ritual Encounters, the Vanderhoef Studio Theatre at Mondavi Centre at U. C. Davis was reconfigured as a kind of a temple celebrating the secular and sacred environment of California’s Mount Tamalpais. Visitors to this installation were invited to circle (in a ritualized walk or circumambulation) spot-lit ceramic monuments and biomorphic sculptures ringed by dirt mandalas in the large, semi-dark exhibition space. Immersed in a looped, meditative video of Mt. Tamalpais, in recorded ecological poetry, and in the clockwise movement of their own bodies among the sculptural way stations, viewers experienced (or recalled) their own link to the non-human world and were given pause to reevaluate the ground they stand upon, both physically and ethically.

Images: John Janca and Lance Kuehne