Luke 12:51 

The Blue House Gallery and Studios present "Luke 12:51" by artist Jake Saunders of Chicago, Illinois.

Luke 12:51 opened Saturday April 11th from 6-9pm and ran through April 30th.

From The Artist:

"This body of work, ​Luke 12:51 ​uses visual tradition and symbolism cherry picked from thousands of years of Western religious culture to construct a coded journal of sorts. Traditional visual narrative conventions are used as substrates on which to project my own thoughts and experiences.

Making various degrees of substitutions or alterations to what would traditionally be in a picture of the given subject, such as the use of myself in place of the protagonist in a narrative, I redirect or manipulate the established meaning of the subject at hand. Often, this takes a highly autobiographic form, using familiar visual terms and cues to describe the idiosyncratic.

While I now consider myself an atheist, I was raised in a family and community that was highly expectant that I be a Christian. Like many youth in my situation, my adolescence was often a struggle between the sometimes high, but ever present pressure to adopt the ideas of Christianity and my own logical conclusions regarding this. As this struggle continued into adulthood, I became very resentful of Christianity and religion in general.

While I had become hardened and bitter regarding the cultural pressure in the day to day, I had become enamored by much of the art and narrative associated with it. Reflecting this, my work often uses Christian symbolism against itself, making tweaks to narrative forms established by artists hundreds of years ago by the likes of Dürer and Carivaggio, in allusion to my view of the nature of the subject.

I have a very polar, love/hate relationship with Christianity. However, to its credit, many of the stories found in Abrahamic texts and culture contain universal human ideas that have transcended millennia and continents to find relevance in my own life. Through this work I have found a way to simultaneously reject and appreciate Christianity and religion in general, while using it as a vehicle for my own secular confessions.

Luke 12:51- ​Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division"

Luke 12:51 opened Saturday April 11th from 6-9pm and ran through April 30th.