Church Over Spirit (God the Mother, God the Daughter, God the Holy Spirit)
LAMAR ROBILLIARD, Church Over Spirit (God the Mother, God the Daughter, God the Holy Spirit), 2024, Wood, cowrie shells, Haitian rum, ceramic sculpture, incense sticks, 50 × 5.5 × 12 in
Church Over Spirit is the second iteration in my Black Madonna series. I’m playing with the idea of a reimagined Holy Trinity—questioning why there has never been a feminine depiction of God × 3, and wondering what that might look like.
The Barbancourt bottles connect the work to my Haitian ancestry—they’ve long been used in spiritual ceremonies. One bottle is uncapped and empty, symbolizing the spirits in transition or the afterlife. The other represents the spirit of the living. I placed the missing bottle cap on the back of the sculpture to hint at the playfulness of spirit—how it always lingers behind us, dwelling just out of view.
Is it church over spirit—or spirit over church? I leave that for you to reflect on.
As a conceptual artist with a didactic intent, my practice takes a multidisciplinary approach, using information as a medium. This information is drawn from research, which ultimately informs my choice of materials. The work expands upon a range of ideas—Sun Ra, Black material culture, literature, spirituality, resistance, assemblage, Haiti, the unfavored American experience, and an obsession with flying and freedom. I often substitute the word fly for free in an effort to soften the weight of freedom, redirecting the imagination toward flydom.
Through curiosity and skepticism, I cross-examine the political and socio-economic dimensions of the information I engage with, and how they shape our behavior and psyche.
My goal is to challenge the viewer’s understanding of a subject—in hopes of lifting whatever veil they’ve been conditioned to believe. Acknowledging that we each hold singular perspectives, I aim to point toward the ones we may miss, while remaining open to the perspectives that emerge through the exchange between artwork and audience.
The work featured in Nou Ayiti explores the deep relationship between Haitian ancestry and American life, and how my own upbringing informs my practice. I hope it inspires other Haitian and Haitian-American artists who may not yet be deeply connected to their roots to discover the throughline between home and the new homes they’ve migrated to.
Lamar Robillard is a conceptual artist, photographer, and educator working primarily with visual familiarity and found objects. His practice is an act of resistance that takes a multidisciplinary approach to examining visibility, nonconformity, and spirituality as they relate to identity, Black material culture, and the self-coined “Unfavored American” experience.
Robillard’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at ArtPort Kingston, Bed-Stuy Art House, HAUSEN, Art Helix Gallery, Swivel Gallery, EFA Project Space, the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building, Collision Gallery, and ChaShaMa Galleries.