Aidan Grueling’s ‘Strange Liturgy’ is an ode to the void, to absence and presence and to the scales of the body and the landscape.

“Left to the mercy of my own druthers, I would completely rearrange my furniture every six months. And I would move to a new city every four years. There is release in the unfamiliar. And there is familiarity in the new— how I miss those wings of my neural labrynth that fling wide their doors when I must find my way in a new place. Often, when I paint, it is to rearrange the furniture of my mind. And to move to a new part of the soupy maze in my skull.

I know that it’s a species of compulsion: over and over, I am trying to reconcile where my mind walks where my feet do, and the specter of that effort haunts even my most earnest attempts at realism. When my work is shared, when I think that it is appreciated and understood, it’s a confirmation to me of more than self: however brief, it is a confirmation of surroundings both emotional and physical (and what a relief to be in a place that is made real by witnesses!). And so I create to to confirm my deeo depths— which, it turns out, are spacial in nature. I am choosing my colors and repainting my canvases to give a feeling of what the space I inhabit is like. I hope that, for some viewers at least, this show will be unexpectedly true in it’s symbols as many half-known liturgical images have been for me.

An alternate title I considered for this show was ‘The Liturgy of the Inside.’ The narrative that is waiting to be woven between these images is the same shuffling hero’s journey that an armchair might take in the time-lapse footage of my apartment’s many rearrangements.

Art is a ritual by which I am trying to feel my old familiar way of feeling new. I am trudging the worn paths of the labrynth to worship feeling lost. In the end, it is a strange liturgy.”

—Aidan Grueling, 2025