Embracing the Weird: A New Moment for Latter-day Saint Art
Megan Knobloch Geilman (American, born 1986)
Joseph’s Book of the Dead (2017)
Digital composition (printed on matte canvas), 36 x 48 inches
Courtesy of the artist
By Ted Bushman & Kristin Perkins
In a photograph staged like a mural, Joseph Smith faces off against Anubis, the Egyptian God of the Dead. Joseph, recognizable only by his stiff coat, high collar, and cravat, looks like a red-headed BYU dental student—Anubis wears a paper dog mask, black shirt, black pants, and black tie. Between them sits a scale, evenly balancing a marble heart and an ostrich feather. Surrounding the two figures are tokens: an upturned hat (seer stone presumably inside), a ring of keys symbolizing the priesthood, a masonic pyramid, a large letter "G" that would look at home in a first-grade classroom, a horn, lion and alligator figurines, a picture of a rabbit in a small frame. For a Latter-day Saint audience, the collection of symbols, artfully framed by deep blue velvet curtains, presents a tableau at once familiar and strange—and that is exactly the point.
This photograph is from Megan Knolboch Geiman’s series Works of Translation, arranged and edited by her and shot by her collaborator Samantha Zauscher. In the series, she places familiar characters in Christianity and Mormonism in highly-staged sets surrounded by household objects. Many pay homage to famous paintings—Emma Smith stares plaintively over one shoulder with a pearl earring à la Vermeer; Malchus sits like Van Gogh with a bloody cloth wrapped around his head and over a missing ear. The work brims over with significations and layered meanings, some obvious (Eve holds both a bitten apple and an open book) and some obscure (Adam sits near eggs and an orchid). Contrary to the trend of much LDS art that focuses on the beauty and accessibility of scriptural characters and ideas, Geilman's portraits use everyday objects and theatrical composition to make the quotidian and recognizable seem arch and unfamiliar. The overall effect is, well, weird.
We at The Season have seen a lot of this “weird,” in Geilman’s series and as a broader trend in art and literature about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our goal isn’t to create a definitive taxonomy, but we hope to capture a sense of this moment that we are calling Weird Mormon Art, its potential origins, and its rhetorical effects.* “Weird Mormon Art” is a cross-disciplinary trend that intentionally defamiliarizes Mormon symbology, often reappropriating Mormon kitsch, history, and culture into new contexts. In these paintings, zines, and novels, things that were once comfortable and familiar are rendered strange and disorienting. Thrown into a different light, we find ourselves forced to reconcile with a new viewpoint. Temples are reimagined as spaceships, the sacrament bread transubstantiated into green jello, and one of the mystic three Nephites wanders an upmarket grocery store as in, respectively, Michael J. Sorenson’s zine If You Could Hie to Kolob, Hayley Labrum Morrison’s painting Nourish, and William Morris’s short story “After the Fast” from his collection The Darkest Abyss.
Michael J. Sorenson (American, born 1989)
If You Could Hie to Kolob (HIVE ZINE-013)
12-page zine
Courtesy of the artist
Hayley LaBrum Morrison (American, born 1986)
Nourish and Strengthen
Diptych, spray paint and oil on cradled panel, (5 x 7)
Courtesy of the artist
Weird Mormon Art runs the gamut between high and low culture, from the gallery space to the Instagram post. It crosses and sometimes erases the boundary between devotional and critical, long held as the most salient lens for Mormon art critique. It can also vary in its level of abstraction, although defamiliarization requires at least some representational object, figure, or event. It draws on some of the art of the past (for what is a walk in Salt Lake’s Gilgal Gardens but a jaunt through a surreal blend of the ordinary and the odd), but it feels uniquely current—part of a cultural moment we find ourselves in.
Created by (often young) artists and writers with post-modern sensibilities, informed by Mormon history, and steeped in Mormon culture, the Mormon Weird might not be a cohesive movement, but it does constitute an active and evolving moment. It’s a mode of engagement that defies our expectations about how artists and writers express their religious experience, questions what is “fundamental” about our religion, and exists in vivid, minute-to-minute conversation with the mainstream church.
There are a number of artists working in this space, although rarely does an artist’s whole oeuvre fit within this trend, and it’s often more accurate to talk about single pieces of art or stories. Annie Poon became famous for her black and white animations capturing childhood’s imagination and awe, but her work about Mormon history and scripture — the first vision of Joseph Smith, her Book of Mormon coloring book—combines familiar stories with the strangeness of her stop-motion cartoons. There’s Casey Jex Smith (think Mitt Romney as D&D character “Lord Spelldyal” with a listed 19 charisma), Emily Larsen (Emmeline B. Wells collaged into a radiating background), and Maddison Colvin (architectural composite of LDS temples). In literature, Steven Peck’s The Scholar of Moab is a near-perfect example—the titular “scholar,” Hyrum Thayne, develops a conspiratorial belief that he must save his home from Gadianton Robbers. Other Weird Mormon Literature includes work by William Morris, Luisa Perkins, D. J. Butler, and Aaron Michael Ritchey. Viewed as an aesthetic form broadly, the trend is inclusive of the Instagram account @texturesofmormonism, whose half-mocking, half-celebratory crowdsourced images of LDS meetinghouses contain images of surprising beauty and resonance, and @themormonr, meme page of the B. H. Roberts Foundation which transforms ludicrous meme formats and exploitables to Latter-day Saint ends, placing niche Mormon controversies into modern contexts.
Likely the greatest unifying force in the trend is The ARCH-HIVE, an art collective based in Utah, founded by Laz and Camilla Stark in 2019. The collective operates as a league, broad and loose enough that artists from all over the United States contribute to group shows (staged at Writ & Vision Gallery) and zines. Not all the work in these shows and zines are identifiably “Weird Mormon Art” (not all have a Mormon figure, building, or symbol that is transformed and recontextualized), but the ethos of the collective centers on exploring the “unique perspectives & peculiarities of Utah, Mormonism, and the American West.” The collective’s statement lends itself towards the transformational and esoteric—use of the Deseret Alphabet, combining Utah landscapes or botany with traditionally Christian images, and playful riffs on Book of Mormon or church history characters. Stark described their goals in an interview: “We engage directly, but from different angles than we’re used to seeing with Mormonism. It’s artwork that is exultantly celebrating and embracing the weird quirky bits and saying ‘This is us. This is our culture. Look at it— be proud to be part of it.’” Weird Mormon art and literature resonates in our cultural moment. Why?
“There’s definitely a generational quality to it,” said Brad Kramer, curator of the Writ & Vision gallery in downtown Provo. Many of the artists working in this space are under forty. Looking at a piece like Laz’s satirical Joseph Smith’s Pro Revelator, designed like a game for the PlayStation, it is easy to see the influence of youth culture and irreverent internet meme pages. These aesthetic referents are not unique to Mormon art—we live in the age of Everything Everywhere All At Once and Rick and Morty, and every year a new think piece about “groovival” or “old web” or “weird core” gets published by mainstream media. Some of these referents come straight from the 90s, some are earlier. William Morris, author of The Darkest Abyss and the current Association of Mormon Letters president, cites being Gen-X and the attendant influence of post-modern authors, the ascendency of genre fiction, and punk/post-punk sensibilities.
These influences extend far beyond the Mormon art scene, but bringing these styles to religious art is transformational. Kramer described this transformation: “Part of what we’re talking about is shifting patterns in the relationship between our sense of devotional spirituality and aesthetics. We’re changing the boundaries and changing the norms around what kind of aesthetics strike us as spiritually appropriate or conducive to spiritually enriching art.”
Of course, not all artists working in this space understand their art as devotional. Some artists mobilize their histories with Mormonism to offer critique or to differentiate their work in a curatorial landscape interested in artist’s identity and personal voice. Others bring an ambivalence and uncertainty to their work that has been rare given the church’s in-or-out approach to discipleship.
Among all the explanations for the trend, it’s impossible not to see this movement in context with the Church itself and the specter of Correlation—a clean, simple word that strikes fear into the hearts of many a Mormon artist. While the Correlation Committee began when Joseph F. Smith was Prophet, to unite disparate instructional texts churchwide, the Committee has been primarily perceived as a tool for narrowing the Church’s cultural and linguistic range.
There is a sense that one of the greatest threats to church membership was the unsettling weirdness of our history, and one of the greatest threats to the church’s standing among other American religions was the enduring weirdness of our culture. Responding to these concerns means inoculating members to the strangest parts of its history and ending unique cultural traditions and rituals—removing live endowments and historic murals, ending pageants, the logo redesign, and designating the 22 paintings that can be displayed in church foyers. In the eyes of many, these changes are wise solutions to existing problems.
But in the effort to smooth out the Church’s roughest edges, something else is lost—and many artists and writers in the Mormon Weird recognize it. As Steven Peck, whose novels incorporate our culture’s most wacky and wonderful, says, “In correlation, we’ve homogenized [Mormonism] to the point where things like creativity, and self-expression get squashed a little bit. We’re missing that element of wonder and awe. The destabilization that’s appealing to people in this weird moment is a movement away from correlation, from homogenization.”
It’s of course tricky to assign motivations to a whole group of artists, whose work is varied. Artists' and writers' influences come from some mixture of their histories, peers, mentors, and a mystical ether. It is easier to identify not why this art and literature exists, but what it does for us, as readers, as viewers, as (and here we’ll reveal our authorial bias) as fans. To this end, we present three case studies.
In Steven Peck’s science fiction short story A Strange Report from the Church Archives, it is 1916, and Elder Talmage is on a journey to Southern Utah to investigate tales of a man selling “possibility machines.” Upon arrival, he discovers that the machines—disguised as children’s toys—allow users to make a wish that can change the past. The wish is granted, but the people who make the wish instantly forget the world that existed before the change. Talmage watches as two bereaved parents wish their son had not died on a mission—and then feel foolish, since the son is already in the room with them.
The wishes start small but soon take wild turns. Talmage suddenly remembers that Joseph Smith didn’t die at Carthage, but came to Utah with the Saints and lived until his 80s. More wishes transform ancient history, preventing the fall of Rome, and changing the structure of the Church itself. By the time Talmage finally finds the seller of these devices, the world we know is completely gone. Elder Talmage, not realizing the incongruity, introduces himself as “Second Elder in the Church of the Firstborn of the Son, Keeper of the Elysian Mysteries, and Proconsul of New Ionian Sea City.” You’ll have to find the story in Peck’s collection Wandering Realities: Mormonism Short FIction to see how it ends.
A Strange Report represents an important rhetorical effect of Weird Mormon Art: that of destabilization. The story relishes in dissociating us from Mormonism, at least as we know it. As Peck says: “If I step back and look at Mormonism from a distance, it is weird. We talk about angels and gold plates and all of these things that, from a secular realism point of view, seem utterly bizarre… Mormonism has borrowed syncretistically from masonry, and it becomes this hodgepodge… this whole movement has been strange and otherworldly.” In A Strange Report, the reader is reminded that from a certain perspective, the history and current reality of the Church are just as wild as the alternate scenarios presented. In this story, where anything could be true, what is fundamental about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?
A Strange Report and other destabilizing works force readers to reconsider their expectations. It doesn’t simply reaffirm a core testimony, the implicit goal of most devotional art. Peck, and others, invite us to regard what we think of as normal and observe it in clarifying and often unsettling light.
Laz (American)
Recreation of Home Shrine, Deseret X-9, ca. 5755
Installation, Mixed Media
Courtesy of the artist
Our second case study is Recreation of Home Shrine, Deseret X-9, ca. 5755 by Laz, from The ARCH-HIVE’s first group show, Holy Hell in 2019. Picture a corner of the narrow Writ & Vision gallery taken over by an installation meant to invoke a living room around the turn of the 21st century. There’s a rug and a pillow, an old television on a small console, candles flickering almost ritualistically. Like with the Megan Knolboch Geilman photo, it’s the small details that matter—that draw the viewer in: a pizza box satirizing the Little Ceasar logo with “Little Seers - Hot-n-Worthy,” an unopened bottle of “Coca-Kolob,” an “I Want to Believe” poster tacked crookedly to the wall depicting the First Vision. The focal point is the flickering television showing the start window for “Lehi’s Dream Turbo,” with a grainy image of a tree with white fruit and a man in a white headdress standing before it in awe.
The piece draws on iconic imagery of both Mormonism and childhood to create a heady synthesis of nostalgia and religion. Laz brings playfulness to the devotional. It’s a Mormon art idiom that doesn’t take itself seriously, and, the fact that it doesn’t, opens up other ways of engaging the sacred. The piece revels in the hyper-specific. In his online presence as @mormcore, Laz often engages the hyper-specific of Mormon culture and history, including controversial and faith-shaking events like the burning of the Nauvoo Expositor and the Salamander Letter. In a time when young people have felt disillusioned over the hidden things shouted from the internet’s rooftops, joking about these historical moments defangs them and reintegrates them into a community narrative. As Camilla Stark, Laz’s co-founder of The ARCH-HIVE, puts it: “Having in-jokes is powerful… It’s bonding for people and creates a sense of community.” Laz’s work asks us to embrace being weird, even when the oddity is uncomfortable—and it does so playfully.
For our final example, we turn to Matt Page’s graphic novel Future-Day Saints.
Future-Day Saints: The New Arrivals, Matt Page
Future-Day Saints presents a maximalist, colorful intergalactic Latter-day Saint future, where “Earth Humans” are one of dozens of faithful species who have emigrated to the distant planet of New Zion. In this cartoon landscape, prophets and priestesses share the stage with heroes like Zelph, a 12-foot-tall skeleton wearing two glowing seer stones in his empty eye sockets; Triple Combination, a three-headed record-keeper in indigenous feathers; Dr. Sunstone, a gay doctor depicted as, quite simply, the Nauvoo sunstone with cartoon arms and legs; and villains like Kinderhook, Natural Man, and the steaming angry Hot Drinks. Page’s pulpy adventures are lightweight but filled with both faithful and progressive details.
The third installment in the series, The New Arrivals, takes a more serious turn from previous volumes, as it tells the story of Zioneers—a spaceship of faithful believers who have traveled across the stars to join the community of believers. With the gift of tongues, the Zioneer’s leader, a seer’s daughter named Laurel, tells the story of their people’s revelations. The community welcomes the new emigres with the generosity of spirit one should expect from New Zion.
The New Arrivals represents a third rhetorical effect of Weird Mormon Art: presenting aspirational visions of a possible Mormonism. Page imagines a pioneer story in a context without colonialism, indigenous displacement, or frontier violence. He uses the tools of the Weird to safely offer alternate routes to Zion. It’s a utopian vision, drawn from a place of love, to imagine a more loving place inclusive of diversity and difference—open to the odd.
In 2021, Church leadership announced they would strip historic temple murals from the Salt Lake and Manti temples and would end the practice of live endowments. Since 1893, these murals guided saints through the theatrical ordinance of the endowment. According to folklore, more evocative than true, aging temple-worker Eves had worn down the paint around the forbidden fruit through decades of sacred choice.
This practice and these pieces of art represented an incalculable cultural treasure. Camilla Stark wrote mournfully about the loss, saying, “I have a hunch that our increasingly anemic cultural heritage leaves modern-day Mormons with little to hold on to. It makes me cry to think that in Mormon temples we used to play music and dance, and now we watch slideshows in silence.”
The artists of the Weird Mormon Art moment do not have a unified thesis or rallying cry. They have diverse motivations and feelings about the Church. But many of these works present a vibrant counter-thesis to the shrinking cultural heritage of the mainstream Church. Weird Mormon Art doesn’t aspire to develop, as Orson F. Whitney hoped, “Shakespeares and Miltons of our own.” It isn’t interested in mass accessibility, normalcy, or cultural approval. The Mormon Weird is unashamed. It is the voice of those who disagree with the streamlining, the watering-down, and the Church’s 20th-century conservative appeasement strategies. Simultaneously, Weird Mormon Art embraces destabilizing perspectives on the Church, questioning ‘fundamental’ elements and encouraging radical reimaginings.
Perhaps one of our great cultural sins is a textual sophistry, a belief that our religion can be reduced to simplistic, straightforward text. Church leaders tend to see any non-textual parts of our religion as frippery. The practitioners of Weird Mormon Art and Literature present, in response, an overflowing multimedia waterfall of forms, from the painting to the installation to the novel and beyond. Some of the deluge is devotional, but very little of it conforms to our visions of reverence. Some of it is unsettling. Much of it is attempting a form of creative theology—a synthesis of observation, imagination, and revelation into a new vision.
In this, Weird Mormon Art echoes the unquenchable polymathic theology of Joseph Smith. Religion, like art, suffocates when it is confined to the comfortable and controlled. This work demands that we gaze into our own personal seer stones and see anew our history, our religion, and our future.
*Throughout the article we use the term “Mormon” to describe a cultural designator inclusive of but larger than The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
