Aaron Rosen, professor of Religion & Visual Culture, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C.

Well  – art selection and comment

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“In Well, Weevers imagines an infant—rendered exquisitely real through stereoscopic video—submerged in a well. To view the work, one must peer down through a grate in the floor of the historic crypt of St. Lebuinus Church, in Deventer, Netherlands. Watching this child float mysteriously in the depths might elicit anxiety or even guilt, and the artist hopes that viewers take the time to dwell in these emotions and reflect on their sense of responsibility to the most vulnerable.

Infants and mothers appear throughout Weevers’s oeuvre, often suspended in dark, uncertain spaces which emphasize their isolation. On the one hand, these figures evoke the Madonna and Child, the subject of so many Christian altarpieces and icons. Yet rather than evoking the reassuring tenderness of so many nativity scenes, Weevers’s video works place the burden on us to create narratives, to find intimations of hope in the darkness.”

Copyright © 2021 by the Christian Century. ‘Well, art selection and comment’ by Aaron Rosen is excerpted by permission from the September 30, 2021, issue of the Christian Century. To read the full article, click here https://www.christiancentury.org/article/art/well-stereoscopic-installation-loop-2017-arent-weevers

Aaron Rosen, PhD, professor of Religion & Visual Culture and director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C., USA.