The Sanctity of Summer Raine Young’s June Mornings
© Summer Raine Young, June Mornings, 2024
With an absence of mind, I step through an open door into Summer Raine Young’s Sapphic Sanctuary and am immediately submerged in the Prussian blue of cyanotype. The walls and windows are adorned with soft, inviting textiles rich in color, and yet I’m drawn passed them to the back wall. Here, in the heart of the gallery/sanctuary, are thirty images whose blues have been muted with coffee, and they’re not stained on textile but on watercolor paper. I witness each image, one by one, until I’m baptized in the numinous [1].
The Sacred and the Mundane
From Young’s statement: “While it [their home] has become a safe haven to explore their identity and freely express their emotions, there were times when they struggled to feel worthy of taking up space.” I find myself immediately proud of the artist taking the audacious step to “take up space” and share their sanctuary with us.
Young may be surprised to see me latch onto the religious definition of sanctuary instead of the more common, colloquial sense of the “safe haven” they include in their statement. But any good personal sanctuary is, at the root of it, religious in the broadest sense, where one can commune with oneself and those they love. The home–the hearth–is a place of worship.
Young’s true sanctuary is not accessible to us. We learn here that the Sapphic Sanctuary exhibition is only a telling, a vision of its reality. These images are only the means by which we can imagine it. In each, we see their bedroom, we see their bed, where this poetics of space was destined to end.
We see Young with their partner, without their partner, with bundles of blankets, with dogs and cat (I’m privileged to know that there is a second cat, never shown). Around the headboard, we see painted feminine nudes texturing the wall–I recall the Chapelle du Rosaire [2]. This is the Sapphic Sanctuary, around which all other works in the exhibition are in orbit.
The thirty images that comprise June Mornings are displayed in calendar format, with an initiating Saturday accenting the top right corner and a Sunday punctuating the sequence in the bottom left. Perhaps it was for this reason I was drawn to it, something recognizably arranged, signifying…time itself? A narrative, or the guardrails of living. Maybe it just tickled my bureaucratic nerve. But the initiating Saturday and punctuating Sunday framing this June, this high holy festival for the queer community, summoned me for contemplation like church bells.
The sacred and the mundane [3] is an old categorization, with countless cultures consecrating gardens and groves, temples and tabernacles. The idea of the temenos (sacred enclosure) was taken from the ancient Greeks to become an invaluable token for psychoanalysts and anthropologists of the 20th century. It came to signify not only the sanctity of place, but also of time (holidays, festivals, the birth of a new year/new world, as well as analysis and self-communion). Here, Pride Month is situated, reinvigorating a sanctity ravished by corporate appropriation–that which is profane.
While Pride makes us think of parades and flags, pride is perhaps most needed in the quiet corners and passive moments. Do you have pride when you’re in your bedroom, alone or with another? To what degree is pride communal, interpersonal, individual, and within? We know the Pride of June to be thunderous, but pride too is a gentle beat to which we step when we slip storm into our bedrooms and crawl bolt out of bed. Pride is in our songs and cheers. pride is in our whispers, our pillow talk.
Young’s exhibition talks of time quite a bit, and this is made most obvious by a work that involves cyanotype on textile that is made into a clock. On the face of the clock, Young’s bare body plays with / nestles into / dances with the numbers that meter our lives. The artist mentions to me in passing the pressures of time, how we feel we are working toward something, some age, that we are losing youth hemorrhage moments in pursuit of this future destination. June Mornings helps to chronicle the moments we might otherwise lose, even those repetitive ritual moments like our time spent in bed.
Laid Bare Before the Sun
Two nightstands are positioned on either side of June Mornings. Cyanotype on fabric are upholstered to the top of each of them, displaying white silhouettes of what we can assume litter Young's actual nightstands.
The nature of cyanotype is such that the negatives of the images are brought out into the sun and projected onto a photosensitive chemical solution for exposure. And so prior to laying bare their sanctuary on the gallery wall, Young also had to lay bare their sanctuary to the daylight. The process is just as instructive as the images themselves. This is a bold turn for someone who has struggled to feel worthy of taking up space. Here, the precious space they have given to themselves and consecrated is offered first to the scrutiny of the sun, then placed before the congregation. Is the gallery a reliquary for the invaluable, or an altar with a humble offering? Both, a paradox–and all numinosity comes from paradox.
Young’s process results in prints of varying quality. Some of June Mornings are more faded than others. Some have such steep contrast it’s hard to parse out the details of the bed. I’m reminded of memory. Some fade, some have stark contrast, and some are so shaded that they end up vignetting a smile and a dog like June Mornings’ punctuating Sunday. We call memory fallible, but that’s only because we don’t recognize or understand its design. Is the sun fallible because Young’s prints are inconsistent? Are the photosensitive materials? If every day were exposed just the same, there wouldn’t be days that stand out from the others. June would become homogenous / monotonous. It would impress upon us the wrong message.
Hierophany
All aspects of life have the potential for hierophany–manifestations of the divine, the sacred. The demarcating line between the sacred and the mundane is a human line, and anyone can find the sacred in anything. Young invites us to sit in our places with our moments, to recognize and feel the seconds, and to find sanctuary within them. Once initiated, you learn that the sanctuary is not the gallery, nor even the places displayed within the gallery, but in the moment of viewing, the moment preceding, and the moment after.
Summer Raine Young is a fine art photographer and full time Art Handler from Baltimore, MD, currently living in Phoenix, AZ. Self-exploration through photography has become a necessity in further understanding their own identity and has given them the confidence to take up space over the past decade they have been openly queer . As someone who tends to manifest in their own thoughts, body language becomes a crucial way to portray their interpretation of matters that sometimes cannot be achieved through words, which gives Young a sense of control. Their work revolves around themes of queerness, memory, and home. Their cats, Tortilla and Guacamole, freely enter the frame as they please, and have come to represent the comfort Young needs throughout their journey of self discovery.
Young earned their Bachelor of Arts in Photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD in May 0f 2019. They are currently an artist member of Eye Lounge Gallery in Phoenix, AZ.
[1] Rudolf Otto gives us this term, defining it as the “non-rational, non-sensory experience or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self.” The numinous is comparable to a confrontation with the holy, or the sublime.
[2] The Chapelle du Rosaire–the Matisse Chapel–is famous for Henri Matisse’s role in the design and decoration. Here, I reference specifically the three murals he painted for it.
[3] For more, read Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. I’ve chosen to use “Mundane” in place of “Profane” given the current connotation of the word.
