A story of faith, created from the ground up

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This article was published 08/09/2023 (784 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the last 15 years, the Winnipeg-born artist [M] Dudeck has been assembling his life’s work. It’s not a painting, a sculpture, or a film, but rather a full-fledged religious universe, inspired as much by the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as the panels of an X-Men comic book.

“It’s a big undertaking,” says the 38-year-old queer artist and theological scholar, who uses they/them pronouns. “I’m not seeking followers, but I’ve been making every part of a religion to not only understand how religion is constructed, but also to exhibit how belief systems can be made in the same way one makes art.”

Dudeck considers religion the world’s first and most influential multimedia production. “(Religion) is a total art experience,” says the artist, who has a PhD in theology and a masters of fine art, along with a BFA from the University of Manitoba.

To create a new religious framework is therefore the ultimate art project and Dudeck has shared their ongoing vision, RELIGIONVIRUS, in more than 30 countries. They’ve designed science fiction-inflected iconography, created new rituals and even worked with linguists to develop a gender-neutral language wherein there are no nouns and only verbs. (It’s tough to explain, but a desk isn’t a desk, it’s desking, the artist says.)

During Chapel, a three-day monastic performance piece now running at Graffiti Gallery, where Dudeck worked for 10 years, the artist is reimagining Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens’ morbid 17th-century painting The Fall of the Damned as an androgynous sci-fi saga, redefining the concept of sin through a queer modernist lens. When it’s finished, it will be a new work, called The Rise of the Damned.

For several hours each day, wearing a black robe and surrounded by three wooden triangular structures covered by other Dudeck-ized works by artists like Boticelli and Raphael, the artist adds their own digital layers to an ongoing story of biblical proportions, projecting the results on the wall for all to see.

“I’m writing a bible in the form of a graphic novel,” they say. “My goal is that it’ll be 5,000 pages long and I plan to work on it until I die.”

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A question often posed of Dudeck is why, and in answering, the artist first looks back at their own upbringing.

Raised according to Jewish tradition, Dudeck had a bar mitzvah, the ritual that ushers Jewish boys into spiritual manhood at the age of 13. But as adulthood encroached, Dudeck started to develop an artistic practice and began to see more clearly the othering effects organized western religion had on queer people and various marginalized groups.

Whereas the religions Dudeck was exposed to were often rigid and proscriptive, the artist’s idealized version of religion was decidedly androgynous and non-binary; they wanted to “expand the space we consider sacred,” in opposition to systems that tell some people that their way of life is profane.

“The artist’s stance is that all religions have always been inherently queer at their heart and that’s nothing to be ashamed of or to hide,” says the Winnipeg writer and filmmaker Noam Gonick, who curated Chapel.

“I think the urgency of asking spiritual questions has increased greatly in the 15 years I’ve been doing this. We are facing our own extinction,” Dudeck says, referring to both climate change and policies that endanger members of the LGBTTQ+ community. In such a world, a sanctuary is necessary, they add.

That’s a major reason Graffiti Gallery executive director Steve Wilson felt it was important for the non-profit to support Chapel as the organization marks its 25th anniversary.

“We’re in a wonderful moment in history where there has been this awakening, when people have felt comfortable to come out and talk about who they are and live at some point on the spectrum of the rainbow,” Wilson says. That’s something worth protecting and fighting for as much as possible, he adds.

On Thursday night, congregants arrived to watch the artist in action. Sitting on the floor, with a digital stylus in hand, Dudeck traced Rubens’ 500-year-old contours for four hours as onlookers considered what it all meant, each drawing their own conclusions.

Kacper Stein, a 26-year-old art historian and former student of Dudeck’s, thought about his Polish Catholic upbringing, humanity’s natural inclination to gather and the ways religion and art are inextricable from each other. Folklorist Anastasia Fyk, 35, reflected on the constant transformation of religion and spirituality as time passes.

By design, there is no single answer as to what Dudeck’s work means, but Carlos Cruz, a 25-year-old figurative portrait artist, tried to summarize what he was watching.

“I think it’s a rejection of formalities in art, using the visual language of science fiction to also reject the stringent standards of organized religion,” he said. “It took me a minute. But I could be wrong.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com