DIVINE RIGHT brought together six artists working across large-scale painting and photography within the physical and symbolic space of the church. Situated within the broader curatorial framework of Reclamation, the exhibition examined what it means to reclaim religious spaces.

The title deliberately invoked the historical concept of divine right: the belief that authority is conferred by God. Here, that proposition was inverted. Rather than asking who has been granted the authority to speak for the divine, DIVINE RIGHT asked who has the right to access it, interpret it, and locate themselves within it.

Presented inside a church, the exhibition treated site as an active component of the curatorial framework. Large-scale paintings entered into dialogue with the architecture and symbolism of the sanctuary, while a solo photography presentation created a distinct visual encounter within the larger exhibition. Together, these interventions activated religious space as both subject and context, allowing contemporary artistic practices to inhabit a setting shaped by histories of devotion, ritual, community, authority, and exclusion.

Across six distinct practices, reclamation emerged not as a rejection of faith, but as a refusal to relinquish it. The works considered how questioning, reinterpretation, and self-determination might coexist with devotion, proposing that spiritual belonging need not depend upon conformity, permission, or prescribed identity.

DIVINE RIGHT ultimately positioned the sacred as something that can be encountered personally and collectively. By reclaiming religious space through contemporary art, the exhibition asked whether the church might hold complexity rather than resolve it and whether claiming one’s place within the divine can itself become an act of agency.

FEATURED ARTISTS

Camila Webster, Hayley Sheldon, Luanne Parmalee, Jessica Kirby, Melissa Delprette, Gaby Viteri, Elizabeth Palace.