Events

From January 15 to March 27, a selection of artworks by Professor Jonathan Anderson will be on display at the Dal Schindell Gallery. There will be an open reception with Jonathan on Wednesday, January 15 (4–7 pm) and an artist talk on Monday, January 27 (6–7:30 pm) in Room 100.

About the Exhibition

This exhibition features a selection of artworks made by Jonathan over the course of nearly a decade, 2005–2014. Drawn from three different series, these works all begin from the premise that representational paintings are like built structures, setting up provisional spaces for negotiating our ways of dwelling in the world. In many of his paintings, Jonathan purposefully conflates the construction of an image with the (re)construction of a building, a chapel, a home. But the curious thing about painted images is that they generate all such spaces in entirely flat surfaces. And this creates important tensions inherent to all representational paintings: they simultaneously open onto things-in-the-world other than themselves, while persistently remaining their own distinct things-in-the-world (a flat painted surface hanging on a flat painted wall). The painted image is thus both open and closed, offering access and withholding it; and it is the materiality of the paint itself that performs both functions.

In this exhibition, Jonathan actively increases these tensions, often causing the flat ground of each painting to stand forth as a figural object within the painting. Ultimately, this exhibition is an extended meditation on what George Steiner called the “covenant between word and object, the presumption that being is, to a workable degree, ‘sayable.’”

About the Artist

Dr. Jonathan Anderson is the Eugene and Jan Peterson Associate Professor of Theology and the Arts at Regent College. Originally trained as an artist, Jonathan has an MFA in painting from California State University Long Beach, and he was an Associate Professor of Art at Biola University (2006–2017). His artworks have been exhibited widely throughout North America and abroad. Over the past decade, the center of gravity in Jonathan’s work has shifted from artmaking toward scholarship of the interrelations of art history, theology, and religious studies, with a particular focus on modern and contemporary art. In addition to his MFA, he has a PhD in theology and religious studies from King’s College London, and he served as Postdoctoral Associate of Theology and the Visual Arts at Duke Divinity School (2020–2023). He is the author of The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025), Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (with William Dyrness, 2016), and many articles and book chapters on related topics, including “Modern Art” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2021).

The Dal Schindell Gallery is located at Regent College, which sits on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) First Nation.