When they run and play, the three dogs know exactly how to move in a synchronized dance of delight. Brindle, a gray Standard Poodle, leaps with a lightness to her being as she bounds across the field. As the youngest of the dogs, she can outrun and outplay both of her senior male dog friends….
what is seeing dakota?
In this installation, we bring together the artistic process and works of a visual artist with the reflections of a theologian to cultivate imaginative and possibly transformative ways of seeing and interpreting the world around us. We intertwine not only two differ-ent professional practices of art and theology but also our two different ways of seeing Dakota. Our hope is that you who are seeing this installation will see Dakota in a new manner. We invite people to look with intention, to ponder the images and words, and to gather insight from the art and words.
selected works
WATCH YOUR STEP
When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without shape or form, it was dark over the deep sea, and God’s wind swept over the waters. “Watch your step!” Sheila’s warning coincides with my fall off the ladder, landing on my knees. She had told me not to come down the…
Fences
Two summers ago, while participating in the annual bike trip Ride Across South Dakota (RASDAK), I spent long minutes looking at fences. South Dakota fences. Which are sometimes different from and sometimes similar to the lodgepole pine fences I helped build in my youth in Montana. Those fences were made of trees we found up…
Cattle
The Hereford’s eyes, dark with thick lashes, get to me every time. Why do I eat some animals and not others? If I believe cattle are created in the image of God, what does that mean when I eat a steak? I look again into the Hereford’s eyes which look back at me. I’m consumer,…
Song Of The Open Road
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you . . .” from the Book of Job “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven . ….
All Saints Day: For the Lost and Lonely
“Loss is a cousin of loneliness,” Olivia Laing. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone My mother and Lost Bird, a Lakota woman who died at the age of 29, share at least one thing in common. Both have lived at All Saints, the Sioux quartzite building in Sioux Falls, South Dakota….