Aaron Spangler, “Down the Road I Go,” 2024/Photo: Aaron Spangler

I once turned to look vaguely out my apartment window, and at the precise moment my gaze came to rest on a monk parakeet nest perched on top of a transformer, it burst into flames. I looked at another transformer to make sure I didn’t make that one explode, too. It didn’t help that the nest in question was in the parking lot of a Catholic church, but thank God the afterimage did not happen to be the face of Jesus, nor did it start raining frogs; otherwise the fate of the parakeets would have been the least of my worries. But in some corners of the world, and maybe in the lore of Aaron Spangler’s carved-wood vignettes, I ignore the significance of this incident at my peril. But short of the miraculous, religion lives in daily experience as it flickers between providence and the mundane.

Art can capture shared darkness, the social zombie cells at large in the world that can turn cancerous. And if we are lucky, art can make it tolerable or even enlightening. An art object, an icon, a keepsake, can be a zip drive or lightning rod for a wide range of experiences, thoughts and emotions. The cross is a strikingly concise and collectively embraced talisman. Setting aside for a moment that it was the murder weapon for the Christian Messiah, a cross is made of the intersection of a horizontal and vertical element. And the center point shows the event horizon, the crash zone, the heart of the matter, and can be imagined as a collision, a point of connection, a breaking point, or a vortex through which another dimension or reality becomes available. It can be seen as a superposition, as an expression of the uncertainty principle where an occurrence is both an act of God and an act of man, both providence and coincidence. And it can be seen as a figure suspended on earth between heaven and hell. I could imagine rubbing a cross hanging around my neck as the parakeets met their demise and my discernment mechanism vacillated between witchcraft and bad luck for Polly.

Aaron Spangler, “House Plant,” 2024/Photo: Aaron Spangler

When we enter Spangler’s exhibition of graphite coated bas-relief carvings and tapestries, the first encounter is with a crucifix at the scale of what you might find in the narthex of a church, which sets in motion the either/or, both/and structure of the works that follow. And it would not be so out of place in a church if not for the “arms” of the cross, which are carved instead into the shape of airplane tail wings. The name of the piece, “Solid Gold Jet Fighter,” confirms the conflation with an airplane, and because there is no vertical element pointing upward as in most religious crosses, it gives the impression of being cut off from the divine element. This airplane is in a nose dive and is taking the poor bastard attached to it straight to hell. But it would also not be absurd to imagine this being as the patron saint of crash landings. Who doesn’t need that?! It is maybe not totally unrelated that the Christian messianic story is one of failure, humiliation, torture and death, and invites us to walk the same path.

Half Goya, half Paul Bunyan, half fire and brimstone, some of the works read as simple rural vignettes if not for the foreboding trees that loom above hapless humans who bushwhack clearings in the verdant diorama to make space for a Pontiac or a woodshed.  In “Down the Road I Go,” a line taken from the refrain in the title song, “Ramble Tamble,” a jangly 1970 ballad by Creedence Clearwater Revival, a cross is carved into the ground of the image, oriented in the picture such that it appears upside down and recedes into space. The upside-down cross is both an irreverent heavy metal flex and the device upon which the apostle Peter was said to have been crucified—head down by request, feeling himself unworthy of dying in the same manner that Jesus did. The cross points at three trees, each with an eerily similar hole in the trunk at the same height, as if nature is teasing Donald Judd. Witchcraft or coincidence?

Aaron Spangler, “Daily Driver,” 2024/Photo: Aaron Spangler

“Natural Disaster” portrays a downed mammoth white pine, the bark rendered in mesmerizing detail, having flattened a cabin and taking out a few humans with it. The roots rise up like a liberated squid yearning for infinity, but still in the same nonchalant fatalist key of the Midwestern ethos. Storyteller Garrison Keillor used to say about the Norwegian Lutherans that their concept of nature is informed by the fact that it is trying hard to snuff you out by cold and darkness half of the year, but there’s no use in making a fuss about it. Like in “Hell Awaits,” one of the hand-woven tapestries produced on traditional Norwegian looms in collaboration with Bruce Engebretson, eternal damnation looks kind of cozy, less menacing than the bare-knuckle devotional quality of the wood carvings.

It wasn’t so long ago that if you threw a rock in an art school, heavy odds favored hitting a rabid atheist in revolt against a childhood religion. Art can be a faith for the faithless, complete with the militancy of small differences. But there is a quality in Spangler’s and Engebretson’s work of bearing a cross that may have been imposed, that may be tinged with betrayal, but that still lives in the landscape and filters the mundane events of life that present themselves as both sacred and profane, both witchcraft and coincidence, and mediates the uncertainties of cause and effect.

The profound religious questions are alive on these walls. What good is a crucifix when your beloved leaves you, or a child dies, or your home and livelihood are destroyed by something outside of your control and you don’t have insurance? Well, none, really. In the novel “Because of Winn-Dixie,” there’s a candy that has the flavor of each person’s sadness. To one young girl, it “tastes like not having a dog.” In the spirit of the cross, the event that falls in the crosshairs, that touches the earth between heaven and hell, that touches the middle of your body, is as subjective and as common as can be. The cross might invite you to imagine that you have just been baptized into the eternal community of humans who are, or have, or will, suffer in the same way that you do. And the loss and bitterness and death can also taste like not being alone.

“Aaron Spangler: Ramble Tamble” is on view at Engage Projects, 864 North Ashland, through February 15.
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