Installation at The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD, USA.
Roominous is the title of Nancy Josephson’s installation that serves to anchor The Great Mystery Show’s grand-scale Half Moon Gallery at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland.
Josephson’s mirrored doors act as interactive invitation, beckoning each viewer entry into “a new and deeper internal landscape”. Nancy’s doors both reflect and capture the individual image of each museum visitor. Doors and thresholds have long had special symbolic significance throughout many cultures, symbolizing the separation of the sacred from the mundane, or entry from this world into another.
Josephson’s three, beaded, 7-foot tall spirit guardian figures are sisters who act to form a sacred triangle. Although each an individual and magnificent entity, together they are made stronger by acting in seamless concert as one harmonious unit. They surround a central pillar featuring a slithering beaded snake traveling heavenwards, representative of life’s greatest mysteries of fecundity, transformation and the alchemical rectification of that which is dark, hidden and broken to the inevitable ascent into great light and wholeness. Haitian deity, Papa Legba, is also represented in Josephson’s Roominous with a key in his mouth as spirit intermediary who aids communications between human and spirit world.