#religious-iconography

#religious-iconography

The artists José Parlá and Claudia Hilda, his wife, live in a former fire station in Fort Greene surrounded by memories of Cuba, which Parlá's family fled in 1970 and where Hilda lived until recently. "There's a lot of magical realism here, a big mix of Cuban traditions and religion," says Parlá, pointing to an icon of la Caridad del Cobre, the island's patron saint, in the kitchen. "We cannot move her!"

In Light of Innocence, a stained glass solo exhibition by Raúl de Nieves, currently on view at Pioneer Works, is also in many ways a collaboration - across tarot, Mexican folklore, and Catholicism, as de Nieves draws from these visual traditions to create a grand cathedral in the central gallery. By installing art with strongly spiritual and religious connotations, he's transformed the space from a creative one to a contemplative one.

Gareth McConnell doesn't see things like everyone else. He sees the world in technicolour, as his photographs of wild horses illuminated in neon light and his psychedelic flower arrangements attest. His take on street photography is equally vivid. In his new photo book, Window, published by Sorika, McConnell brings together beautifully grainy crops of scenes from his bedroom window in east London - a supermarket carpark, a funeral car passing by, strangers going about their day.

The present collection builds upon this recent body of scholarship. It embraces the expanded framework of visual and material culture studies to explore a spectrum of objects executed in a broad range of media.