Jess O'Farrell 2025

Abstract

“The Sacred and the Profane: An Altar to Queerness”-honors the divine and holy within the marginalized identities of queerness. I have created a sacred sanctum where intaglio works become sculptural and merge with an immersive space to create an altar to queer devotion and defiance. The United States’ government and, its laws, and regulations are thoroughly influenced by Judeo-Christian culture, which holds a primarily moral opposition to the LGBTQIA+ community. This leads people to believe that queer people are profane or lesser: or, at worst, evil. In this body of work, I reinstate the value of queerness, elevating it to holiness. The altar becomes a transformative space where the sacred meets the subversive. It appropriates, references, and reimagines the iconography of the Catholic Church to assert queerness as divine and unapologetic.

As a queer person I see the tender devotion that members of this community have for each other, and the subsequent need to deconstruct the binary matrix of the heteronormative world. By appropriating the imagery and aesthetics of the Catholic Church I seek to imbue these works with the aura and culturally accepted authority of religious art and sacred spaces. Not only is the imagery an act of devotion, but the making of these objects is as well. Intaglio, and more specifically mezzotints, are laborious etching processes that require an almost religious devotion to the medium. Through the countless hours of preparing plates and burnishing and scraping, the intimacy extends beyond the images themselves into their creation.

This Altar stands as a devotion to something beyond the oppressive doctrines of the past- a celebration rather than a condemnation of identity, self expression, and empowerment. I invite the viewer to confront the intersection of religion, power and identity. I urge them to reconsider the sacred not as a space of exclusion, but as a site of inclusive reverence.