I grew up hearing faith promoting stories of my pioneer ancestors who left behind all they owned to build a new Zion in the wilderness of the American West.  The faithful narrative of my Church’s founding was polished, unblemished, and spiritually uplifting.  If there was any aspect of our history or practice that gave me consternation, I uncomfortably placed it on my metaphorical shelf to deal with later.  

Then everything changed in the early 2000s when an enormous treasure trove of historical documents, letters, and journals flooded onto the internet and instantly became available to members to study, thus ushering in the great “Google Apostacy.” It didn’t take long for many to realize that the tidy “Faithful Narrative” that I had been raised to believe did not exist.  The actual history was raw, messy and filled with sexual intrigue. After reading everything that I could get my hands on, my “shelf”  was shattered into a million pieces.  I was devasted, frantic, distraught. There had been such comfort in the notion of a perfect church. Where was that to be found now? Do I turn my back, do I divorce myself from my faith tradition like so many others were doing?  This was the most painful life experience I had every gone through.

Slowly, very slowly, my initial fury and frustration gave way to a new paradigm.  It began to dawn on me that the notion of this so-called perfect church could not possibly exist, that the leaders were just as flawed as the rest of us.  In many ways, this was incredibly liberating.  I was able to let go of having to manifest outward obedience to an institution.  Instead, I turned inward and rekindled a deeper, more personal spirituality.  I sifted through the ruins of my former faith and found the pieces that resonated with me and discarded what didn’t.  As I rebuilt, I began to experience deeper connections with the Divine, a true sense of transcendence, of trusting my own voice. 

My Paradigm Shift Series springs from the devastating sense of loss that I experienced when my faith tradition imploded, forcing me to come to terms with a new faith paradigm.  The narrative in the paintings traces my journey from trusting follower and questioning believer, through devastation and anger, to a terrible sadness to eventually introspection and transcendence.