*Structures of Faith*

In giving primacy to craft & Christian iconography, Randalf Dilla´s work in *Sacrament * brings to mind what Hegel in *Phenomenology of Spirit* would call the religion of the artificer. Here, Zizek explains, "Natural Religion culminates & points towards its own sublation" & "subjects begin to produce themselves the objects they honor"-where God is no longer Light but Obelisk, where divinity is no longer encountered in nature but constructed therein. This notion of the artificer is in contrast to that of the artist, where the former´s work is *effort* while the latter´s is *spontaneous outgrowth*.

The almost photorealistic quality of his depiction of men in *Sacrament* calls attention to this artificiality: Just as these renditions are fake, just as they are materially constructed-hand-in-hand, fakery & construction after all are fruits of effort-so are the structures of faith built by every artificer. Small wonder that Dilla appropriates the Catholic image of Mary carrying the body of Christ into "My Own Pieta," self-reflexively putting the burden-or shall we say the corpse?-of mimesis in his own hands. Not so much to reclaim the artist´s lost & idealized-lost precisely because *idealized*-subjectivity, but to confess that all totalizing narratives (the salvation narrative of Christianity included) are collective articulations of the subjectivities of various historic blocs.   Continued...