“Michael Petry celebrates the ceremonial, memorializes the mythical and acknowledges, honors and explores the deeper spirits within us whom we all feel and hear yet have always found hard to name. Our gods and our devils.” — Stephen Fry

The Bible praises “the Living God” and decries the deities of surrounding cultures, from the Assyrians to the Greeks, as mere lifeless idols.  Yet these forgotten gods—left for dead in the dustheap of history—are precisely the ones that interest Michael Petry.

“I feel like an archaeologist sifting through the sands of time to uncover the old stories, the old myths, the old beliefs on which modern believers act,” reflects the artist.  “I have bathed in the spirit of the ancients. Marduk and Thor, Brigit and Ra, Janus and Seth are only a few of the now mythologized gods of old. They are no longer held in the respect they were, but does that stop them from being gods? Is it simply time that morphs a god into a myth, and if so what of the current gods, and devils? Will they too just become stories told around a camp fire?”

For his installation At the Foot of the Gods, Petry cast dozens of bronze toes from life from contemporary cultural icons, including British comedy legend Stephen Fry.  In another installation, Piercing the Barrier, Petry inserts patinated bronze arrows into the centuries-old beams of the Parsonage, evoking the Catholic saint (and latter-day queer icon) Saint Sebastian as well as the erotic tools of Cupid. 

Steeped in the history of religion, In League with Devils finds the perfect home at The Parsonage, built in 1831 for the noted pastor Rev. Stephen Thurston (even if the exhibition title wouldn’t have been quite to his liking!). In League with Devils is accompanied by a book of the same title, available for purchase at The Parsonage.