A Note from the Curator, and Our Clergy

Aeon, from the Greek αἰών, meaning age, eternity, or the totality of time, serves as both title and operative concept for Josiah McElheny's exhibition at the Church of the Heavenly Rest. Working at the intersection of glassmaking, cosmological theory, and the history of abstraction, McElheny creates luminous objects and environments that invite contemplation of light, deep time, and the possibility of transcendence through material form. The Church of the Heavenly Rest, with its soaring Gothic nave, clerestory windows, and centuries-deep contemplative atmosphere, provides an ideal setting for McElheny's practice. In this space, the ancient and the cosmological already coexist.

In McElheny's hands, glass becomes a medium for philosophical inquiry. His objects draw simultaneously on the oral traditions of Venetian glassmaking and the speculative fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, translating empirical data into luminous, handcrafted form. The exhibition's centerpiece, The Center Is Everywhere (2012), makes this method literal: working with cosmologist David Weinberg of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project to chart the entire observable universe, McElheny translated a metal plate perforated with data from a single telescopic snapshot of the sky into a hanging sculpture. Each element carries astronomical meaning: isolated Swarovski crystals represent individual stars, clusters of crystals represent galaxies, and the longest brass rods tipped with lightbulbs represent distant quasars. The work is, in the most literal sense, a three-dimensional map of one small, randomly chosen slice of the cosmos, chosen at random because, as Big Bang theory implies, any patch of the universe is as significant as any other. There is no center; the center is everywhere.

Aeon extends this inquiry across media and scale, bringing together mirrored panels, geometric glass forms, observatory paintings, and a suite of photogravures to trace the full arc of McElheny's cosmological imagination. Installed within the nave and the Undercroft Gallery, the exhibition invites visitors to move between scales of time from the intimate, hand-held object to the monumentally expanded universe in a space already devoted to the infinite.

— Wills Baker, Curator

We at the Church of the Heavenly Rest are deeply honored to host Aeon, an exhibition uniquely suited to this space and this season. Through glass, light, and the imagery of galaxies and the cosmos, Josiah McElheny's work invites us to consider our place within creation — offering a perspective that draws us beyond ourselves and into wonder before our Creator. Yet these works are not merely about what we see, but how we see. Through the interplay of glass, light, and movement, each image shifts depending on the viewer's position, reminding us that reality is often deeper than it first appears. For Christians, this is a profoundly sacramental vision. Each Sunday, we experience how bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ, ordinary things reveal extraordinary grace, and the veil between heaven and earth is thinner than we often realize.

The exhibition also recalls the truth of Pentecost: that "The Center is Everywhere." God's presence is no longer confined to a single place or people but fills all creation. If God is the center and God is everywhere, then God may be encountered among the stars, at the altar, within art, and especially within one another. Finally, these works echo the promise of John 1: "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." Light emerges from dark canvases just as galaxies shine against the vastness of space, reminding us that the Light of the world continues to shine and can never be overcome. As you explore each piece, we pray that you will experience God's presence, a shift in perspective, and an encounter with a God who is at "The Center Everywhere."

  — The Rev. Michael Sahdev