About the Exhibition
For Michon Weeks, painting is a contemplative practice akin to meditation and prayer. Working in egg tempera, oil, and acrylic, Weeks paints the quiet terrain of everyday life: yards, tree lines, and utility poles. But these paintings do not describe the ordinary elements of the Minnesota landscape. They are the artist’s method for slow, sustained presence—and an invitation to the viewer to stay with something long enough for meaning to surface.
In Weeks’ words: “There is a way of knowing that is neither intellect nor observation alone, something that arrives through sustained presence, attention, and relation. Hildegard of Bingen called it the ‘Living Light’: a form of perception, neither dream nor reason, but a seeing through. That is why I paint and draw. Painting and drawing are, for me, a contemplative form of knowing.”
Weeks’ practice begins with daily walks. She photographs and sketches what she observes, then revisits that material in the studio before beginning to paint—always in silence. The surfaces of her paintings record alternating speeds of attention: some areas build gradually, others shift abruptly. Landscape features are partially obscured in the process. Recognizable elements remain, but only in glimpses—an ornate gate, a basketball hoop. “When a painting develops a presence that feels independent of my will—coherent, unsettled, and alive—I know it is finished,” Weeks says.
Weeks’ practice draws on a wide range of thinkers, from Medieval Christian mystics to contemporary writers on ecological perception, attention, and contemplative ways of knowing. She is particularly influenced by a strand of ecological contemplative thought that frames sustained attention as a way of drawing closer to a world increasingly shaped by ecological precarity. The exhibition includes a Painter’s Library—a selection of texts that map the intellectual and spiritual terrain of Weeks’ practice.
This body of work has emerged alongside a sustained creative exchange with author, scholar, and fellow St. Olaf professor Trish Zimmerman. Audio excerpts from the mystics, read and recorded by Weeks and Zimmerman, invite visitors to explore the sacred mystery of perception.
This exhibition is supported by the Creative Arts Collective funded by the Lilly Endowment, and the Glen Gronlund ‘55 and Shirley Beito Gronlund ‘56 Annual Exhibition Series at St. Olaf College.
Programming
Screening and Conversation: Michon Weeks & Trish Zimmerman
Friday, September 11, 5 p.m. Screening and Conversation
Viking Theater, St. Olaf College
Opening Reception
Friday, September 12, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Opening Reception
Flaten Art Museum, Center for Art and Dance, St. Olaf College