Roses and Religion Play Parts in Lydia Kern’s Solo Art Show at St. Mike’s

This time of year, the secular and the religious often seem at odds. Spiritual significance can be the entire reason to celebrate holidays, wholly beside the point or, often, uncomfortable to talk about, depending on whom you ask. Yet somehow, culture has thrown a Bible story, a pagan solstice festival, an obscure Turkish saint and late-stage capitalism into a blender and arrived at a coherent understanding of the song “Santa Baby.” Perhaps the true meaning of Christmas is the magic of making meaning at all.

Though Lydia Kern’s artwork is not overtly religious, one can’t help but consider it through a devotional lens in its current context: “Torch Songs,” a solo show at McCarthy Art Gallery at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester. That she can seamlessly incorporate aspects of the spiritual, medical and botanical into her work without any seeming conflict between them is, perhaps, a minor miracle.

Roses abound in this show, appearing in some form or another in just about all of the works. Like their perfume, roses as a symbol can seem cloying or too obvious a marker for love and purity, but Kern — a longtime Burlington artist who now lives in New York City — is adept at wielding them with subtler shades of meaning.

“Rose Ladder (Ode to Ocean Vuong’s Fire Escape and Jacob’s Ladder)” is a simple hanging ladder, crafted from dried long-stem roses lashed together with embalming thread, a frequent material for Kern. The title refers both to a William Blake drawing of angels ascending to heaven and to “The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, and Visible Desperation,” a 2014 essay by Ocean Vuong, in which he recounts the aftermath of his uncle’s suicide. Like fire escapes as Vuong describes them, Kern’s ladder is contradictory: a structure intended to ensure safety but too fragile to use.

Roses as a symbol can seem cloying or too obvious a marker for love and purity, but Kern is adept at wielding them with subtler shades of meaning.

These particular dried roses, with their long, straight stems, have a nostalgic feel to them, as though they are mementos of proms or performances past. Kern’s ladder would indicate that ascension might only be possible for those willing to break physical ties to the past, as Vuong’s relatives encourage his uncle’s ghost to do in the essay. Climbing these thorny rungs would be painful, too — a thought that might leave the viewer unable to move forward or, in other words, in limbo. Vuong articulates what any fire escape, including Kern’s ladder, signifies: “We are capable of disaster. And we are scared.”

“Reliquary for a Rose,” one of four pieces that incorporate roses and piano parts, centers a photonegative of a rose over a small vial of crushed rose dust, both suspended in swirling resin. Felt hammers, springs and wooden levers from a piano frame the image, and a small, burnt candle stub above it reinforces the devotional feel.

In medieval Christian practice, reliquaries were used to both honor and enshrine something — usually a saint’s body part or lock of hair, or a sacred object such as a splinter from the cross — and, importantly, as a physical portal to the spiritual world. Pilgrims would sometimes open a door to reach inside the reliquary and touch the relic, bolstering their prayers with physical contact.

Kern’s sculpture, likewise, offers both an image of the rose as an ideal to contemplate and its physical essence. Here and in the other reliefs on this wall, the piano parts seem a bit clunky and odd at first, but the symmetrical way Kern has arranged them reads as though they are bones splayed out for a dissection. Thinking about them as the mortal vessel for music — the physical thing that creates a spiritual experience — relates them to the rose as a container for scent, memory and meaning.

The same parts tell a slightly different story with “Torch Song (lifeline, timeline),” which uses as its main component the piano’s wide pin block. Instead of the piano strings that once ran through the metal tuning pins, Kern has wrapped thread up and down between them, tracing a line like the peaked one on an electrocardiogram. As well as photonegatives of roses, she hangs tiny brass bells, dried roses and Lake Champlain rocks from the wooden frame on ribbons, some wrapped many times around the roses as though to mummify them. Here, the roses seem much more like bodies — though the piece also locates them as points on a timeline or a musical score.

Kern layers a medical understanding of the corporeal on top of the metaphysical one in many of her works, including “A Severe Gentleness” and “Longterm Quick Fix,” both of which incorporate MRIs of her own brain. In the former, Kern duplicates and flips the scan on overlapping mirror-image transparencies that eerily resemble a pair of eyes. She visually carries the line of the spinal cord down into transparencies of roses and, in turn, down into actual branches of dried amaranth — also known as “love lies bleeding.” The reddish plant takes the place of delicate lungs, underscoring the body’s fragility.

“Untitled (like a river, like a waterfall)” also overlaps black-and-white images printed on transparencies, mounted in a layer of resin, but with a more abstract effect. Here, a larger image of the Falls of Lana in Salisbury — coincidentally, perhaps, near Satans Kingdom — seems to spill down the wall in a cascade of negative images of roses. The images come to rest in a bowl full of rosewater placed on the floor. The inclusion of scent is innovative and enhances an already physically luscious show, but the waterfall imagery gets a little pixelated, blurry and lost in the transparent layers of material. A clearer version of this piece might foreground the rosewater more, asserting it as a distillation of something holy.

Kern’s sculpture “New Order” acts as the centerpiece of the show. The only freestanding sculpture, it’s roughly the scale of a patio table, with a hole in the center of its colorful, glassy surface. Individual dried roses radiate from there, each encased in a saturated background. Below that layer, two more glass ones seem to float: The roses are silhouetted in rose dust in one and white acrylic in the other; its base is a mirror, facing up.

The sculpture is like a stained-glass rose window in a cathedral, but rather than looking up to witness divine glory, here you look toward the Earth. And instead of Jesus sitting in judgment at its center, there’s a simpler image. If you look down through the hole, you see, resting on the mirror, the roses not as blooms but as a pile of seeds — the most basic form of life eternal.

“Torch Songs,” by Lydia Kern, on view through December 12 at McCarthy Art Gallery, Saint Michael’s College, in Colchester. smcvt.edu/mccarthy-art-gallery

The original print version of this article was headlined “By Any Other Name | Roses and religion play parts in Lydia Kern’s solo show at St. Mike’s”