Dylan Mortimer’s struggles lead to a Cure

As an artist known for making impressively scaled signs and combining hip-hop symbols with references to Christianity — Google him and his brilliant Prayer Booths still come up first — Dylan Mortimer has always made personal art. But his latest exhibition transcends the personal for something revelatory. Cure is his externalized dialogue with God, one in which he attempts to lay out the terms of his genetic lot, his cystic fibrosis.

Speaking to about 15 people at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center on a Monday evening in December — a talk organized by a group called the Artist Collective in Midtown KC, which meets every month to discuss art, faith and life — Mortimer said that with this show, he was expressing “the most personal thing.”

Mortimer’s earlier work explored aspects of his own story, orbiting the outer reaches first. Among the elements factoring into those pieces was the fact of his being a pastor’s son. Mortimer is himself a pastor, and, at the age of 36, says he has reached a point — married, two children — at which he’s comfortable exploring the tension between religion and art. As he told those who’d come to hear him speak, he has accepted that he “can’t escape religion.”

Of course, he doesn’t want to. His Christianity is a central part of his existence. As is CF, a genetic, progressive disease caused by one of more than 1,800 known mutations. About 1,000 Americans each year are diagnosed with the condition; if both of your parents have a copy of the defective CF gene, there’s a 25 percent chance that you, too, will have CF. (Screening for the mutations is still in development stages.)

In his artist’s statement for Cure, Mortimer acknowledges that each of us struggles with something, and that we all die (observations he reiterated in the December talk). Coping with such struggle, and with the knowledge of one’s own mortality, is one reason why religion persists as a force in people’s lives, though, as Mortimer points out, some people characterize faith negatively — as, he says, “a crutch,” a coping mechanism that’s risible because it is not science. Acknowledging spiritual belief, he points out, isn’t popular among so-called enlightened people — including mainstream artists.

But crutches fulfill a purpose. As he asks: “Why wouldn’t I use a crutch to walk better?”

Or to make art better — to make the process therapeutic for the artist, to make art that conveys real feeling.

Real feeling, and the sense that you’re seeing an artist confront major personal themes — these come through when you look at the 11 large-scale pieces here. Supported by a few framed works and 20 little maquettes, Mortimer’s art is an enlightening barrage, in a somewhat literal sense — it overwhelms you with sparkly illumination.

Mortimer has worked with marquee lights before, and a couple of the big sculptural works hanging on the walls include them, but his dominant medium at Leedy-Voulkos — chosen mainly for its ability to convey a low-rent baroque effect — is glitter. Lots and lots of glitter. It’s nearly blinding yet deeply attractive. I couldn’t help wanting to stick my face in it.

Cure‘s millions of sparkling refractions allude to the universe’s innumerable stars. With a unifying palette (glitter comes in only about a dozen colors, which Mortimer has manipulated subtly through the use of undertones), the encrusting stand-ins for gold and gemstones evoke a sensory reaction. The effect adds up to an answer to “What’s on your mind, Dylan?” Life is large, this art says. Life is random. Life is difficult to understand.

Within this luminous little galaxy, begin with the multi-piece “Birth Defect,” a huge illustration of stylized cells floating toward a fetus and resolving in blobs of green, glittering mucus. Here, writ large, is the fraction of a fraction of a chance that Mortimer’s birthright would be clogged lungs, a sensitivity to infection, a truncated life expectancy.

The exhibition progresses with other nods to lifespan, with the second large-scale wall sculpture, “65 Roses,” a reference to the phonetic way that children are taught how to pronounce their condition. As in many of the works here, the central figure is a medical-textbook-style outline — this one a brain attached to descending nerve fibers, with sparkling red roses bursting out along a five-pointed thought-beam.

“Ascension” features most of a body, its arms held up, open to God, to life, to whatever is in store. The figure’s sky-blue interior is laced with red arteries and blue veins that mimic patterns in the arched faux-stained-glass window behind.

A number of the titles could be called prayers. And in the 3-D structures are hollow spaces where words are outlined and intentionally omitted, forming a kind of spiritual graffiti (see “Help My Unbelief”). Some of the metaphors at play require a little cultural memory: Recall that Nike Air Jordan shoes once had built-in air pumps, and you’ll better get “Give Me 2 Pair,” along with the half-functioning set of lungs attached to a red-swooshed high-top in “Air Max.” “What the Fucking Hell Is This Shit, God?” shows a running shoe stuck in mucous, struggling, cartoon-like, to break free.

“The God Particle Weeps Too” reaches for the mysterious wonder in science. Its omniscient, eerie eye is painted as a black-and-white, five-ring target, emanating gold tendrils and struck through with three lighted red beams. Below, a three-part dripping blue tear seems to say that even the key to the universe is vulnerable.

The three framed, two-dimensional works convey a calming resolution to the more exposed and riotous sculptural pieces. All in glitter, one is a beautifully stylized “bad” cell, another a set of pulmonary tracts set upside-down, the pink branches outlined in red and almost completely drained of lime-green (the mucous).

Along with these, “The Internal Struggle” and “Airway Clearance,” off to the side and perhaps the last thing most viewers will see, is a humbly sized work on paper. It’s a kind of snapshot of what Mortimer hopes is happening inside him: “My New Cells.”

Last August, Mortimer started treatment on a newly approved medication, one that targets the defective protein responsible for CF. So far, he says, it seems to be working well. For the rest of us, coming to Cure can be a religious experience, or an experience of religion, and not just Mortimer’s. We all struggle with something. We all die. Art can’t cure these things, but art such as Mortimer’s brushes up against a sense of healing.