You almost hear it before you understand it: a choir mid-anthem, mouths in various states of song, some heads tilted back with eyes closed in the rapture of a held note, others fixed wide and alert on the unseen choirmaster. Across three panels a crowd of Weimaraners stands robed in white surplices against a deep liturgical red, ears hanging like the soft folds of vestments, the whole assembly caught in the ragged democracy of any real choir — a few lost, a few transported, most simply doing the work of the hymn.
Choristers II comes from Canis Ecclesiorum, the series Wegman staged for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in 2000, near the Feast of Saint Francis. The comedy is instant and the tenderness slower: give animals the clothes and postures of devotion and you notice how much of worship is posture to begin with. The white robes gather the dogs into a single body of sound; the red ground lifts them toward the altarpieces of early painting, where ranks of the faithful crowd every gilded inch.
Assembled from three unique 20 x 24 Polaroids, the picture cannot be reprinted, which suits its subject — a performance that exists once, in time, and is gone. What lingers is not the wit but the sincerity Wegman keeps finding in his dogs: an unembarrassed gravity, a willingness to stand in the light and mean it, until a room of Weimaraners in choir robes becomes, improbably, a picture about faith.
You almost hear it before you understand it: a choir mid-anthem, mouths in various states of song, some heads tilted back with eyes closed in the rapture of a held note, others fixed wide and alert on the unseen choirmaster. Across three panels a crowd of Weimaraners stands robed in white surplices against a deep liturgical red, ears hanging like the soft folds of vestments, the whole assembly caught in the ragged democracy of any real choir — a few lost, a few transported, most simply doing the work of the hymn.
Choristers II comes from Canis Ecclesiorum, the series Wegman staged for the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in 2000, near the Feast of Saint Francis. The comedy is instant and the tenderness slower: give animals the clothes and postures of devotion and you notice how much of worship is posture to begin with. The white robes gather the dogs into a single body of sound; the red ground lifts them toward the altarpieces of early painting, where ranks of the faithful crowd every gilded inch.
Assembled from three unique 20 x 24 Polaroids, the picture cannot be reprinted, which suits its subject — a performance that exists once, in time, and is gone. What lingers is not the wit but the sincerity Wegman keeps finding in his dogs: an unembarrassed gravity, a willingness to stand in the light and mean it, until a room of Weimaraners in choir robes becomes, improbably, a picture about faith.