Window Gallery:
Devotion
Jessie Stueck & Jayden Thompson
September 12 – November 7 | 2026
Jayden and Jessie are frequent collaborators, both in community and in their respective practices. This exhibition brings together recent works from both artists that repeat and reinterpret Christian imagery. The pieces selected for display centre stories, images, and experiences that are usually marginalized in the Christian canon.
The content of Jessie’s sculptural body of work includes recreation of images from medieval manuscripts and iconography of saints and other figures from Christian narratives and theology. The sculptures selected here feature events from the life of Mary and Mary Magdalene. Both are important female figures in the life of Christ, who often appear in Christian imagery in both central and secondary roles. In each piece, Mary and Mary Magdalene are interacting directly with angels, reflecting the artist’s interests in Christian mysticism and a direct relationship between the human and divine.
Jayden’s Sappho Stain II uses the deeply familiar image of a stained glass window to depict a vulva. This depiction echoes historical representations of Christ’s side wound and the mandorlas used to indicate divinity in medieval religious art. Jayden’s prints operate inside the window gallery to emulate the inside of a church, while the sculptures access iconographic language often used to visually convey theology in religious spaces. These pieces work together to center experiences that are not dictated by heteronormativity and the patriarchy, and reimagine who and what constitutes divinity. Both Jayden and Jessie grew up attending Christian churches, but are now creating from a secular lens, and their experience of revisiting Christian spaces and ideas from the outside will be repeated by the viewer examining the work within the proposed display.
Jessie Stueck (she/her) Jessie is a multimedia artist who has been incorporating ceramics into her practice since 2024. A large component of her ceramic practice is creating contemporary iterations of classical imagery, most often Catholic iconography from the medieval period through the proto-Renaissance. Jessie’s ceramic sculptures are based in extensive research of the source material, and they work to emulate the simple representations of the human figure seen in pre-Renaissance artwork, especially in medieval icons and manuscripts. Each sculpture incorporates contemporary song lyrics, which provide a visual link to iconography’s textual source, as well as connecting the pieces to the present day and the artist’s personal experience. Jessie prefers to fire her sculptures using atmospheric processes, allowing the firing process to inform and complete the works.
Insatagram: @jessiemadethisstuff
Jayden Thompson (she/they) Jayden’s practice is based in printmaking and photo-based processes, including screen printing, intaglio, photography, and cyanotype. Their work begins with an idea, often emerging from her writing of feelings and experiences with identity, grief, and memory, and moves across processes until the material is able to hold it. Jayden’s Sappho Stain II screen prints reworks references to religious imagery to frame queer embodiment. As light passes through the image, the bodily form is illuminated rather than condemned. By suspending and elevating the print, the work becomes a visual encounter that challenges normative ideas of gender, sexuality and devotion, as a site of worship. Across her practice, the body appears as both subject and site. Nothing in her practice is fixed, instead it remains open to transformation, continuously searching for new ways to bring ideas into being, while resisting singular definitions and allowing space for change.
Insatagram: @jrt.arts
