Dylan Mortimer, the Kansas City Art Institute grad whose
Prayer Booths graced the Avenue of the Arts last year, has moved to New York for a graduate degree, and the booths have been shipped off to Chicago for display at the Navy Pier Walk 2004. All save one, which found a home outside the Rivercity Community Church at 40th Street and Wyoming. It seems that Mortimer attended services for several years at Rivercity and donated one of his pieces to the church this summer. Mortimer's sculpture resembles a phone booth, sans phone. Instead, a blue cushion folds down to allow someone to kneel at the booth, rest his elbows on the metal shelf and lean into the space created within the blue plastic walls, adorned with the universal sign of prayer: a picture of clasped hands. That would happen if someone wanted to take the sculpture literally, as passers-by occasionally have, says Dawn Lindsey, administrative assistant at Rivercity. One woman figured that Rivercity must be a church that orders its patrons to pray outside, in public. "She didn't get it," Lindsey says. But most everyone else seems to enjoy the novelty of the piece which, as Mortimer writes in his artist's statement, raises questions about "whether or not prayer should occur in public spaces, and if it does, how do[es] the surrounding public relate?" The answer seems to be that the public relates to a prayer booth as it would to a phone booth. At least, that's how the neighborhood graffiti artists related: by tagging the booth with markers as they might any other utilitarian-looking object in their path. "I meant to go out there and try to scrub that off," Lindsey says of the graffiti, though she admits she was a little amused that it appeared. And as public church art, it sure beats a bleedin' Jesus.
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