This is the text placed on plaques next to the images that are meant to mimick the Stations of the Cross. It was created as a cut-up from text taken from an actual Stations of the Cross I found on the web.
I.
My Son,
How your eyes penetrate my soul to know my love for you.
For a brief moment we touch.
II.
“Hold me my Son!”
See the thorns pierce his scalp, the nails pierce his flesh,
Feel it pierce your skin, rub raw the place it lays.
III.
He is stripped.
A mother’s heart aflame
with desire.
His body,
his wounds emit forth a perfume of love.
IV.
A degrading act done upon my Son.
Hunger for him in new ways. You will embrace the cross in new ways.
V.
To a tree, nail him. The nails are so large, striking again and again, deeper and deeper. He groans for his mother. You will feel his wounds.
VI.
A mother’s pain is manifested in her heart, at her breasts. You will truly know pain in a deeper way. You will fall with him.
Amen.

Here is part of some Q& A I did for the Mother of God exhibit. Also, here are some images from the show.
Responses to Noelle’s Questions

Michelle Levante “A Season Of Healing” 2007
12 Photos Mounted onto Wooden Plaques And Shellacked

In what ways does your work manipulate the viewer? In what ways is your work a manipulation of sight and touch?

While my work manipulates the Catholic tradition of the Stations of the Cross, it’s based on a reaction to organized religions need to manipulate our sense of sexuality. Growing up in a passive Catholic family, I was introduced to a preponderous of graphic images of martyrs and of course Christ and the Virgin Mary. The overt piety, denial of sexuality and a glorification of suffering left a strong impression on me as a child. Female saints were heavily draped in fabric hiding their bodies to avoid giving lustful young boys a sexual object to look at. The male martyrs and figures of Christ on the other hand were presented naked, sensuous, in as much agony as ecstasy. How many young girls had their sexual awakening because of these images I wonder. Like the trees healing around the invasive metal object, we can be resilient to hypocrisy of what religions teaches women (and men) about our sexuality. We can heal ourselves and manipulate this into something we desire.

How do you create a conversation around the manipulation of women’s bodies?
There is such a long history, that it seems to come naturally, for the artists, institution, whatever. It is interesting that this is the assumption of what is happening in the show. The idea of Mother of God was to bring a sense of an empowered woman into the conversation of religion I believe. For me, giving the Virgin Mary an aggressively sexual voice was a way of finding a voice, however extreme, to women who are indoctrinated into obsessing over their own bodies, rather than the bodies they are sexually attracted to.

How does a “shared dialogue” and collective art process effect what you create? How does it manipulate the idea of the ‘individual” art creativity?

I was very interested in working collectively with a group of women. It had been a long time since art school and the trauma of the art critic. There competition and one upMANship was par for the course. But working with a group of women who have come together in this context was empowering, uplifting and had the true spirit of a communal experience. I doubt that my work would have changed much based on the gender of the participants, but I think that the comfort level on dealing with intimate and sometimes personal work led to more open discussions and ideas. It was a great experience.

I just finished up a residency with Gaia in Hoboken NJ and a six week group show at Mana Fine Arts. The project was called A Season of Healing, and here is part of the text from the artist talk. I am currently reshooting the images and creating new configurations, but I will have the actual plaques I used for the show photographed and put up later.

.A Season of Healing is inkjet prints mounted on wooden plaques, and covered with up to 5 layers of shellac. The top row of images shows the phenomena of trees growing around an intrusive object. The bottom row is divided between male and female body parts mimicking roughly the images above.

Stations of the Cross:
The text was taken and cut-up from text I found online. It had that overt, passionate Harlequin romance quality to it, which I found kitschy. But it also was also reinforcing this idea of eroticism and death. The Virgin Mary’s voice is used to describe the scene taking place, and we are to empathize with her suffering, but also her weird excitation at the martyrdom of her son. This seems to be a very Catholic theme, a wallowing in excess and extremes and finding relationships between opposites. Such as the extreme guilt over sex and issues of the body, but then an acceptance of mystical experiences, religious fervor, and ecstasy of both body and mind such as we see in the saints.
I was just making this hypocrisy a bit more obvious by cutting up the text to emphasize the sexual nature of what was being said.

Trees and the resilience of nature:

The ultimate mother of God I suppose is Mother Nature, the universal laws that govern us all. I find the phenomenon of trees healing, overtaking, engulfing a foreign object quite fascinating. How the healed over area looks like flesh, how there seems to be an impaling quality, almost sexual sometimes. Who is winning, is there a struggle even, or is the tree turning an obstruction into a false symbiotic relationship. A kind of forced conjoined twin, which the tree being the one who can grow will overcome, engulfing the obstruction completely.
I was thinking how organized religion acts like an obstruction to natural law sometimes. It stands in the way to progress, creating a barrier to fully realizing our natures, our desires, and our deaths even. But in the end, nature will always have the final say, we give into carnal lust, we drink, we fall in love and are passionate, and we die and rot, nature engulfs us.