church

church is a new site-responsive installation by collaborating Bay Area artists Kerri Conlon and Leila Weefur that approaches the architecture of the sacred not as a fixed historical artifact, but as a mutable living environment. The exhibition asks the question: “How do we access feelings of reverence and transformation outside of established structures of power?”

Departing from Northern California’s complicated relationship with transcendence, which has inspired genuine innovation and dangerous delusion in almost equal measure, the exhibition responds to the region’s unique search for spiritual connection. Drawing on the artists’ shared interests in ecclesiastic symbology and architecture, church considers how we can design and create alternative spaces that evoke awe, wonder, and reverence while resisting historical and entrenched structures of power. Unfamiliar yet resonant, the exhibition offers an alternative point of entry, creating room for questions and voices long shut out of conversations of sacred spaces.

Weefur brings a practice already deeply rooted in sacred spaces. Their prior works have transformed galleries into chapels, reckoned with the Black queer experience inside the Christian church, and refused the spiritual traditions that have historically excluded his community. Conlon arrives from her own relationship with ecclesiastical architecture, asking how what grows through rupture can produce a new formal language for the sacred. Together, their collaboration proposes an alternative structure, shaped by mutual dependence rather than singular authority.

The exhibition also includes original sound created by Zachary Watkins in response to the installation, adding a sonic element that culminates in an evening of live sound performance.

church is organized by cloaca projects.