Sacred Streets Statement

Artist Statement

I begin on the street level, walking past tents, trash heaps, and soup lines on skid row, drawing materials in hand. I want to know the individuals from this community on a personal level, and the best way I know of connecting is to make portraits. To draw a person, in person, is for me a means of being present and attentive.

I make the portraits on reclaimed objects from the very streets where I meet people. And in the end, I’m interested in the possibility of re-imagining  the world and the people I meet in terms of a deep and pervasive sacredness.

The built space in which these portraits are placed further stands as a symbol of the beautiful collision of the sacred with the mundane. Its components are informed by scriptural descriptions of the most sacred of all spaces in the end of time where things are “made new.”

Exchange

For millennia, artists have created paintings and sculptures of saints, both to reflect on their lives and what they can teach us and to show honor back to them. For Sacred Streets, we invited viewers to interact similarly with the people represented in the portraits.

As people spent time with the portraits and stories, they wrote down what they saw and received in these images. They placed them in the receptacles below the portraits they felt drawn to.

After the show, these notes were given directly to the people to whom they were written.

— JASON LEITH

Sacred Streets Team:

Jason Leith — Artist, Director, Vision

Jessica Airey– Public Relations

Olivia Blinn– Photography

Jessica Byrd– Building Project Manager

Hannah Efron–Building Team

Adam Hillyer– Video

Jori Johnson– Building Project Manager, Coordinator

Nicole Leever– Building Team

Steven Reynolds–Web Design

Norma Santamaria–Graphic Design

Nathaniel Smith– Building Team, Design