Fairs

75 Varick Street

Booth#A18

May 6 – 12, 2025

Gods, Beasts, and Reckonings

The divine, the primal, and the existential confrontations in two artists’ works, Ebenezer Singh and R J Calabrese

Religious catharsis and socio-political purgation have been central to American life for centuries. Today, while religious fervor has greatly diminished in modern American society, socio-political anxiety has taken its place, shaping everyday life. Artists, too, observe the lingering religiosity in their immediate surroundings or the psychological tension that influences those around them, leading them to draw, paint, and create sculptural installations.

Artist Ebenezer, through his Fulbright Scholarship research, has explored Christian religious symbols. He questions the concept of a heavenly persona who resides in paradise yet descends to Earth—a planet that has existed for billions of years and is still evolving. In his sculptural installation Tight Rope, the artist provocatively examines the role of God during the Late Jurassic periods. Here, the Christian God appears to be precariously balancing on a tightrope stretched between the neck of a Allosaurus and a Brachiosaurus. This installation serves as a poetic testament to human desire and the constructed notions of heaven and hell, which exist merely to ascribe meaning to human existence.

Another of Ebenezer’s installations, Paradise Sermon, depicts a congregation of dinosaurs listening to a prophetic sermon. Dinosaurs from across the Mesozoic eras are assembled before a preacher-like figure, prompting an ironic meditation on human ego and its desire to dominate other species. Can the God of humans also be the God of other beings—especially those from ancient prehistory? Can this divine entity, who dwells in paradise, offer salvation to these long-extinct creatures and guide them to heaven?

Artist RJ Calabrese’s works take the form of painted intaglios, where sculptural projections emerge as psychological pictograms oscillating between visions of earthly heaven and hell. We live in a world as senseless as the one portrayed by Calabrese—equally violent and perverse. The difference is that we imagine our world is governed by reason rather than whim. We attribute cruelty to individual wickedness, believing it to be an aberration rather than something embedded in the very foundation of existence.

\In Calabrese’s world, grotesque and nonsensical violence is unabashedly the norm. Perhaps that is why, for all its outlandish elegance and monstrosity, it feels disturbingly familiar. Beneath the surface, we know that violence, domination, and cruelty are not exceptions but banal and commonplace. Yet we persist in pretending that they are deviations from some imagined ideal—an essence just beyond our reach, to which we hope to return. But alas, as Calabrese reveals, our fate is not a descent of grace from paradise but rather the grotesque. And our end comes not with a bang, but with a whimper.