In the Present

Ryan Bush’s Writing the Divine: The Space Beyond Words represents the artist’s attempts to bring visual expression to the inexpressible. Bush is interested in how spiritual ideas of the divine are abstracted and communicated through language and writing. To create the works in this series, Bush repeatedly writes phrases of personal and spiritual significance to fill sheets of paper that he then stacks and lights from behind before photographing. The resulting images depict diffuse layers of fragmentary script. Illegible as writing, the marks become visual forms and metaphors for the difficulty of portraying the divine.