Axis Mundi Exhibition, 2014
Installed at Museum of Contemporary Religous Art, St. Louis, MO



Included in exhibition:
There’s A Nova In the Bed Next to Mine, 2009
Vellum paper, staples, polycarbonate, galvanized steel wire, zipties Overall: 240” x 178” x 110”
Taproots, 2014
Two Laser-etched polycarbonate sheetings. each 152" x 42", both collection of Museum of Contemporary Religous Art
Rain Makes Applesauce, 2013
vinyl tapestry, 72” x 435”
Summer Sun, 2013
vinyl tapestry, 72” x 198”
Celestial Pole, 2014
vinyl tapestry, 72” x 72 Collection of Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

The axis mundi is a connector between heaven and earth, a point of beginning and ending. The convergence of the four compass points, it bridges the known and unknown, the experienced and the believed. The axis mundi is a universally shared phenomenon: Norse mythology has the cosmic ash tree Yggdrasil, which unifies the nine homeworlds, while the Bodhi Tree was the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. The Biblical tradition situates the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden.

The axis mundi serves as the unifying construct for the first site-specific installation at MOCRA, an exhibition that reflects on the communities we exist in physically and those we share existentially—our ever widening and intersecting personal and collective axes mundi—utilizing multiple elements to create an abstracted environment in which color, form and the contemplative nature of MOCRA's space work collaboratively.

Axis Mundi highlights significant architectural features of MOCRA’s nave gallery and emphasizes the space's original purpose as a chapel for Jesuits who studied philosophy at Saint Louis University. The exhibition centers on a tall, glistening white structure that reaches from the floor to the ceiling thirty feet above, a tether signaling our globally connected existence without referencing a specific tradition. Four wall hangings from Niederlander's Essential Drawings series, imagery initiated from detailed photographs of her physical sculptures and then redefined through continued expansion and contraction, surround the suspended structure. Finally, two of the chapel’s ten stained glass windows are exposed yet covered with translucent film so that the figural imagery of the windows is abstracted to reference the undefined and unifying light that guides humanity. by Fr. Terrence Dempsey, Director and Curator of MOCRA, and from MOCRA website

Celestial Pole, 2014
vinyl tapestry, 72” x 72
Collection of Museum of Contemporary Religious Art

Entry point of exhibition, in which visitors are invited to take one element of cut and stapled vellum paper as a gift.