Agony in the Garden
Jim Strong
Opening Reception: Friday, January 9, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, January 9th | 6pm
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Agony in the Garden is an exhibition and temporary chapel space designed to honor seasons of change which strip away our foundations to reveal the solid ground. Developed in response to the deaths of beloved friends from suicide and sudden illness, it also marks the conclusion of ten years of exhibitions and programming at Vox Populi Gallery.
In the story of Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, he experiences such grief that miraculous fonts of blood pour from his skin, becoming the mysterious words of surrender: “Thy will be done.” But first he asks, “Will you take this cup from me?”
Spanning Galleries 1 and 2, This exhibition begins by holding the paradoxical invitation grief offers: that we might lean into our growing edges of trust, making any needed petitions for help, protection, and guidance. In doing so, the process of grieving opens us to a lattice of past wounds which come to us in veils, often through dreams and sensations in the body. As an Extant part of this work, the show is infused with Lattices, Wounds, Gardens, Veils and populated with creatures. Mutter/Matter/Mother/Matrix/Wombs- paraphrasing, Jakob Boehme ("True Yieldedness”, 1622). Strong’s paintings are conceived without touch, allowing evaporation to form images as residual skins that blush with the interiorities of angels, animals, plants, and missing texts. The results are both tied to the synesthetic associations of spiritual abstraction in painting but also feel as a system, like some alternative universe of early photographic/ alchemical production. Each work is housed in a many-eared wooden reliquary, like Ezekiel’s vision of wheels within wheels, somehow diverted toward that most strange of appendages. The installation ends in the garden chapel, where viewers are greeted by roses, large mice, donkeys, lambs, rabbits, books and a few friendly saints carved from rotting tree limbs.
Please check the gallery’s website for a full calendar of events, including bereavement counseling, somatic awareness, medieval herbalism, rosary circle and silent meeting for worship in the manner of Friends.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jim Strong is an artist and musician whose body of work spans painting, sculpture, musical instrument invention, performance, writing and publishing – Often merging these elements into works and environments, which humorously frame the artist's faith, confusions, friendships and dreams.
He has created site-specific work for the National Liberty Museum, The Philadelphia Flower Show and Rhizome DC. He has exhibited at Vox Populi Gallery and Space 1026 in Philadelphia, Platform Project Space in New York City, The Center for New Music in San Francisco, CA and Hudson House in Hudson, NY. He has performed music and screened work internationally notably at RAUMERWEITERUNGSHALLE (Berlin-Friedrichshain) CPH:DOX (Copenhagen, DK), Unrequited Leisure (Knoxville, TN). His music has been released by Horn of Plenty (UK), Vitrine (US), More Mars (Greece) and Chocolate Monk, (UK). He operates the experimental music label, COR ARDENS and under constantly shifting pretexts, has organized events and workshops in abandoned graveyards, school auditoriums and exhibition spaces throughout the Philadelphia area. (@jiim_strong)
