Ordinary Work

The Curious Matter Holiday Installation

December 24, 2025 - January 31, 2026

“I knew nothing; I was nothing. For this reason, I was chosen.”  — St. Catherine Labouré

The days are short, the dark settles early. Each winter, our annual holiday installation engages a visual and narrative language that is foundational to us: the imagery and lessons of the Roman Catholic Church. While the ideas we explore are broadly human and widely shared, the language through which they are expressed is culturally specific, shaped by devotion, ritual, and tradition. Our project is offered as a celebration of light, undertaken with full awareness of the Church’s long history of institutional failure — harms and exclusions that have counted us among the ostracized. This reality cannot be set aside. Still, we remain attentive to the images, stories, and ethical aspirations that endure beyond the institution’s authority. Ideals of justice, care, humility, and grace, however imperfectly held, continue to shape our moral imagination.

This year’s installation turns toward the story of St. Catherine Labouré.

Catherine was not distinguished by talent or ambition. Born into a farming family, she was dutiful and accustomed to work that went largely unnoticed. After the death of her mother, she assumed domestic responsibilities at home, and later entered the Sisters of Charity as a novice at the age of twenty-four. Her days were filled with routine tasks: kitchen work, tending animals, maintaining the ordinary rhythms of convent life. She did not seek attention, nor did she imagine herself marked for anything extraordinary.

It was from within this unremarkable life that Catherine experienced a series of visions in 1830. In the first, she was awakened in her cell by a luminous child who led her to the cloister chapel. Though locked for the night, the doors opened easily. Inside, the chapel appeared brightly lit, as if prepared for a Midnight Mass. Seated in the Spiritual Director’s chair was the Virgin Mary, whom Catherine later described as “the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.” She knelt beside her and rested her hands in Mary’s lap, experiencing the warmth and solidity of her body. Mary spoke to Catherine of suffering and upheaval to come, and told her that God wished to entrust her with a mission.

In subsequent visitations, that mission was revealed. Catherine was to act as an intercessor, and to have a medal produced according to a design Mary showed her. In this image, Mary stands upon a globe, crushing a serpent beneath her feet. Rays of light stream from her open hands, extending toward the world below — signs of grace offered to those who ask for it. Encircling the figure are the words: O Mary, Conceived Without Sin, Pray For Us Who Have Recourse To Thee. The reverse of the medal bears the letter M intertwined with the cross, flanked by the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and surrounded by twelve stars.

Catherine was instructed to bring this design to her confessor. It took more than two years for her account to be believed and for the medal to be produced. Church officials doubted both the authenticity of her visions and her capacity to articulate such complex theological imagery — particularly the phrase “conceived without sin,” which had not yet been declared official doctrine. What ultimately persuaded them was not eloquence or authority, but Catherine’s consistency, her refusal to claim credit, and her insistence on remaining silent about her experiences. Her description of Mary’s physical presence — her warmth and weight, her corporality — was taken as proof of the vision’s reality.

The first medals were struck in 1832. Following the completion of her task, Catherine requested she be assigned to the care of the sick and dying. She dutifully served and lived the remainder of her life in obscurity. Only on her deathbed did she speak of the circumstances surrounding the medal, which by then had become an object of devotion throughout the Catholic world.

Our installation brings together devotional materials of St. Catherine — prayer cards, pamphlets, a copy of Lives of the Saints, and examples of the Miraculous Medal — alongside four prints by Raymond E. Mingst. These prints engage the story of Catherine Labouré through presence and withdrawal. In paired compositions, figures are shown and then removed, leaving only atmosphere: clouded skies, a garden setting, the space where revelation once appeared. What remains is not negation, but a spiritual afterimage. This approach extends Mingst’s ongoing engagement with absence, and the memorializing gesture. The sky or the garden becomes a witness not to miracle, but to attention itself. These works do not seek to explain the encounter with the spiritual. Instead, they offer a pause, a breath in which absence is allowed to speak.

Catherine Labouré’s life suggests that devotion need not announce itself, and that what is entrusted to us may matter more than what we claim. This holiday installation is offered in this spirit: as an invitation to stand in meditation with images that withhold as much as they reveal, and to consider the forms of care, labor, and attention that persist beyond recognition and declaration.

As we enter this winter season and move toward a new year, we share these works with a sense of gratitude for time spent in looking, for moments of contemplation, and for the sustaining gestures of grace that carry light through darker days. May there be room, in the midst of all that asks for our attention, to notice what is modestly offered, and to offer ourselves in return. Each of us has their light to shine.

Raymond E. Mingst, Untitled (Prayer Cards), 2025

Raymond E. Mingst | Arthur Bruso Co-founders, Curious Matter

© 2025 Curious Matter used with permission.

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Of Time and Memory

Gilda Pervin in her studio. Photographed by Josuha Charow

Gilda Pervin

Of Time and Memory

October 5 - November 30, 2025

The city of Gilda Pervin’s childhood was a city of textures. “On a large scale, [Pittsburgh’s] roads and highways carved through the Allegheny Mountains. Visually this created walls of rock and stone,” she recalls. “On a smaller scale, I remember as a child, walking to and from school noticing the effects each season had on the painted brick and wooden houses. The paint was fresh in early Spring, then as the Summer wore on, the surface would bubble from moisture beneath; in Autumn the bubbles would crack, and through the Winter the soot in the Pittsburgh air would darken the edges of the cracks.” For Pervin, these early encounters with surface and change formed a vocabulary of transformation. “I do believe,” she says, “that the visual and tactile experiences of artists as children are often reflected in their work.”

Over decades, Pervin has carried forward a deep engagement with material and texture. From cement—evoking the grit of her earliest architectural impressions—to humble found objects: grape stems, seed pods, plastic toy animals, glass or beads. Like Robert Rauschenberg, whose Combines blurred the distinction between art and life through the inclusion of everyday objects, Pervin embraces the histories embedded in matter. Each found object carries an origin, a texture, and a pattern that is inherent to it. Where Rauschenberg’s objects often retain their raw immediacy, Pervin’s are transformed, coated, and unified in the depth of black. Here she shares a kinship with Louise Nevelson, whose black assemblages harmonized disparate elements into sculptural wholes. For Pervin, black slows recognition: objects first read as line, form, and texture, camouflaging their source materials.

If found objects carry their own histories, Pervin’s black makes them newly anonymous and newly resonant. The sculptures hold what she calls “a moment, and a sense of memory.” Blackness unifies, transforming disparate elements into a whole and beckoning the viewer to linger, to arrive slowly at what the various media have become.

Pervin’s two-dimensional art is animated by the persistence of time. In describing her drawings and paintings of figures she notes “the snap of a moment” that contains within it past, present, and future. For her, the passage of time is inseparable from loss: “sometimes welcomed, sometimes mourned. And that to me is the human condition as we move from birth to death.” This frank clarity gives her work its emotional weight. Time, memory, transition—these are not abstractions but palpable presences.

Despite her classical training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which instilled compositional rigor she no longer consciously considers, Pervin finds inspiration in less expected places. She cites Agnes Martin, whose controlled, meditative grids and stripes at first seem distant from her own organic and intuitive forms. Yet Martin’s discipline and clarity resonate in Pervin’s work, where even dense materiality carries a sense of order. If Nevelson and Rauschenberg are her sculptural kin, Martin provides a counterpoint: restraint, quietude, and the discipline of repetition.

At ninety-one, Pervin continues to work with undiminished curiosity, imagination, and devotion to process. “I love the process—that’s why I am still doing it,” she says. Yet she acknowledges that the finished piece holds its own power: “the discoveries and surprises.” She describes the moment when a form suddenly appears, “perfect, and I have no idea how it got there.” Such moments suggest that making, for her, is a form of revelation—discovery beyond intention.

What she asks of the viewer is simple and direct: to notice. Whether positively or negatively, she wants the work to elicit feeling. And what remains with the viewer, as with the maker, is an awareness that the work is inseparable from the textures and experiences that have shaped her. Her art, she says with disarming candor, is “work that happens from being human and being alive—can’t argue with that.” ✦

Installation of Of Time and Memory in Curious Matter.

Gilda Pervin, Wired 3, 13"h x 18"w x 7" d, Portland cement, sand, acrylic paint, pigment, wire, on wood, 2007

Gilda Pervin, H'yad and the Missing Words, 10"w x 9"h x 3"d, roofing material, iron rod, acrylic paint, acrylic medium, 2023-25.

Arthur Bruso and Raymond E. Mingst, curators

© 2025 Curious Matter, used with permission.

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Erasure Gallery

Erasure Gallery—A Project by Curious Matter

A Call for Queer Visibility in the Arts

On the occasion of Jersey City Pride, August 2025

To be remembered, one must first be seen. And yet throughout history, countless artists have had their identities obscured, their stories rewritten or silenced, and their legacies reshaped by omission and institutional neglect. For those of us who are queer and working in the visual arts, we continue to see this manifested in museum exhibitions that sidestep references to LGBTQ+ identity; gallery labels that don’t acknowledge queer subject matter; and narratives that focus on heteronormative relationships. The rigid demand for strict documentation as a prerequisite for identifying queerness has created a false standard, one that actively excludes lived realities. Many queer artists were compelled to adopt closeted behaviors in response to legal and social persecution. This should not justify exclusion from the historical record. As institutions are increasingly being called to reckon with their omissions, it should inspire historians, curators, and writers to engage in more nuanced and interpretive approaches to telling fuller, more dimensional stories of queer artists’ lives.

Installation in the Erasure Gallery of three fabric banners, depicting figurative images which reflects on the fragility of language, memory and the queer body. Installation and banners by artist Raymond E. Mingst. Each banner is approximate 6' high by 3 ' wide. Images are dye sublimation prints on fabric.

Erasure Gallery is our response to the systemic silencing of queer narratives. It is a temporary and occasional action by Curious Matter to transform the gallery into a site of remembrance, reflection, and resistance. By draping our sign in lavender cloth and adopting this provisional name, we acknowledge the countless queer artists, writers, thinkers, collectors, and appreciators whose full stories have been lost to systemic bias and archival silence. As both a meditation and a call to action, Erasure Gallery advocates for a more expansive approach to how we consider, study, and honor queer lives in the visual arts, to foster a more inclusive and honest understanding of our cultural heritage.

Through this project, we call for a critical shift in art historical and curatorial practices. We seek to:

• recover histories that have been intentionally obscured, recognize hidden or coded narratives, and give voice to those silenced in their era and beyond.

• expose the inadequacies of conventional attribution and labeling methods when applied to marginalized communities and advocate for interpretive frameworks that value context and nuance.

• challenge the notion that a lack of explicit documentation justifies the omission of queerness from historical accounts.

• support and strengthen institutional efforts to combat cultural homophobia, enabling more inclusive readings of both historical and contemporary narratives.

• encourage methodologies such as “queer hermeneutics” or “archival intuition”—approaches that accept ambiguity and empower scholars to grapple openly with intentionally hidden narratives, and make informed and conscientious assertions about queerness despite the limitations of the historical record.

For this iteration of Erasure Gallery, we present new work by Raymond E. Mingst, a continuation of his ongoing project Banderoles, the Apophatic Sky, and the Memorializing Artifact. In this installation, Mingst reflects on the fragility of language, memory, and the queer body. A series of three dye sublimation photographic prints on fabric—each measuring three by six feet, echoing the dimensions of panels in the AIDS Memorial Quilt—extends his exploration of loss, language, and our need to communicate, and the hope that, somehow, the echoes of lost voices might still be heard.

Photograph by Raymond E. Mingst. One of the images on the banners.

© Raymond E. Mingst 2025 – used by permission.

Model: Arthur Bruso

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