The end of the Story?

In these changing times it is the simple things, the intimate things, the things that bring the community together that satisfy. It is the old things that sustain: home cooked meals; Sunday suppers; family albums. Not a facile nostalgia for a mythic time, but actions the embrace and nourish.

These are ideas that Jon Coffelt knows intimately. Raised close to the farm and the church in the rural south, he drank from the deep well of southern storytelling: the stories of his Amish grandparents, the secret meetings among the sacred trees, the overbearing relative whose stories were so ubiquitous that community slang used her name to describe anyone overbearing...

His show COMMUNION is full of these stories made manifest in cloth. Come see them, hear them, read them before the show comes to an end on May 10.

Each little piece, lovingly stitched by hand, has its own story to tell. Somehow by miniaturizing the clothing, the stories are able to escape and become real for the rest of us. Even if we never knew the people who wore these shirts, pants, pajamas, uniforms, sweaters, flak jackets, we now share their stories as though they are our own.

It is a simple thing, story. It can never be taken away from us and it is something we can always afford to freely share. And then, the story never ends.