NYAB Event - Rick Cary "Credo"

Rick Cary "Credo"

Abrons Arts Center

This event has ended.

Rick Cary’s photographs convey the experiences of Signs Followers who live committed to their religious traditions and steeped in a rich, yet dwindling, culture in the southern Appalachian Highlands. He never orchestrates the activities of his subjects, and is present among them with their consent.

Worship services at the church are characterized by expressionistic preaching by Reverend Jimmy Morrow and the congregants, ecstatic dancing, the healing "laying on of hands," and the practice most distinctive of these believers, the handling of venomous copperheads and rattlesnakes caught near the church. Serpents are taken up only under certain conditions - the handler must have entered an ecstatic state called "anointment." The act of handling serpents is not viewed as a test of faith or of God’s grace, but rather as a willingness to place one’s life in God’s hands according to the literal interpretation of God’s Word. Although serpent handlers often say, "God gave us victory over serpents," they are very much aware that a bite from the poisonous snake is not only possible, but potentially fatal.

The artist’s goal of capturing, in the authentic moment, the immediacy of the people’s lived realities supersedes the imperative to conventionally compose and aestheticize. Representing subjects who have been portrayed by media as demented, dangerous zealots, Credo eschews any notion of sensationalism. Although they are subjective reflections of finite moments, the photos may serve as texts that embody universal human experiences, or at least fragments of them.

[Image: Rick Cary "Reverend Jimmy Morrow Taking Up a Copperhead (detail)" (2010)]