By Isaac Hans
Author’s Note: I've been given the privilege of stewarding this newish Anselm Society feature, in which we highlight a visual artist whose work interacts with themes the society loves to discuss. This is the third quarterly installment.
There’s a quiet kind of artmaking that doesn’t always make the headlines—the kind that grows slowly, through repeated gestures, unnoticed observations, and a deep desire to pay attention. There’s this myth of the artist: that we wait around for inspiration to strike, for the burning bush moment. But most of us know that’s not the way. The work is slow and daily. Like the Christian life. We practice rhythms not because they always lead to fireworks, but because they keep us rooted in the ordinary.
Rebekah Blum is an emerging conceptual artist. She doesn’t restrict herself to one medium—she chooses materials that best convey her ideas. In the past she was sewing, stitching fabric and burlap. In the work she currently makes for her thesis show, she’s moved onto wood. She’s been tracking her time in 15-minute increments for an entire month. Now she’s using wooden slats to represent each of those moments—making the invisible visible, one piece at a time.
Rebekah’s work lives in that space of rhythmic artmaking. It’s tender and inquisitive, rooted in rhythm, routine, and the tension between time’s structure and its slipperiness. Her practice doesn’t start with spectacle, but with the simple act of noticing. And in a culture obsessed with efficiency and output, that kind of faithfulness feels beautifully countercultural.
Bike Man (03.3.24, 07:08), Rebekah Blum
One of her projects, Bike Man, is a quiet meditation on that very idea. It began simply: Rebekah noticed a neighbor riding his bike past her window every day. So she started to photograph him.
When I called to talk with her about this project and her process, she said, “I just started taking pictures of things that I would notice. I wanted to slow down long enough to ask and answer, What are my rhythms? What are my routines? What are the small everyday things that are making up my life?”
There’s something sacred about that kind of noticing. Rebekah paid attention again and again, until the sound of the bike man’s tires—snow tires, she realized—became part of her daily life. A kind of alarm clock. A daily presence in her life.
“I realized he has snow tires on his bike, which is why you can hear them more than a regular bike. It became this thing I would wake up to,” she said. “At five in the morning, I'd wake up to hearing his tires and jump out of bed and open the window shade to take the picture in time. I didn't have a lot of thought in making it, but in reflecting on it and hearing other people's reflections, I realized I thought a lot about my neighbor. Like, who is my neighbor? Who are the people that affect my day-to-day life that I don't even really know? I never met Bike Man; he never knew who I was, but he turned into this friend that I cared for. Like if I didn't see him for a few days, I'd start to worry about him.”
Bike Man (05.25.24, 07:54), Rebekah Blum
This way of making—paying attention first, creating second—is not always about knowing where the work is going, and Bike Man started without a clear end in sight. That can feel counterintuitive in a world obsessed with outcomes, but for artists, especially those working in rhythm with the Spirit, this kind of daily faithfulness matters. It’s a discipline of being present, not just being a means of production.
“I feel like I'm trying to get at the root of why I'm so busy and how to make my life calm down,” she said. “I love silence and solitude, those really contemplative spiritual disciplines. I think, how in our frenzied, fast-paced world can we slow down long enough to sit quietly and just be? Our western culture values productivity, busyness, and efficiency, but I feel like the way Jesus lived was countercultural to that. He invites us to rest, tend to our souls, and to live a quiet life of grace and trust. ”
Rebekah’s work invites us into a posture of holy attention—to the ordinary, the unnoticed, the quietly persistent. Whether she’s stitching fabric, documenting a passing bike, or cataloguing her life in slats of wood, her practice is shaped by a desire to understand the rhythms that structure our days—and to question them. It’s an artistic pursuit deeply entangled with spiritual life, one that doesn’t seek control as much as communion.
In her making, Rebekah isn’t just creating objects; she’s building ways of being. Practices that help her listen, slow down, and pay attention to what’s underneath the noise. And yet, even with all that intention, time remains a wild thing.
As she puts it, “Most recently, art has been a way for me to wrestle with time. My life always feels a little bit out of control. Time is like this unruly creature that I just can't make fit into my neat little boxes. So, every season has been a different way for me to try to wrangle this time monster into submission—which hasn't yet worked. But then I remember, God created us to live in time. If time is a good thing, what speed and grace-filled rhythms is He inviting me into?”
REBEKAH BLUM
Rebekah Blum is a Boston-based multi-media artist creating work about time, rhythms, and slowing down long enough to notice. Her work wrestles with the tension of living in a fast-paced and media-saturated culture, while longing for quiet moments of spiritual depth. Graduating with a B.S. in Cross-Disciplinary Studies: Art, Education, and Religion from Roberts Wesleyan College, she spent seven years teaching art in Thailand. She will soon graduate with an MFA in Visual Art from Azusa Pacific University.
Interested in more work like this? Check out:
Hannah Darboven’s work with systems, numbers, and categories
On Kawara’s Today Series which explores how the artist experiences time and habitual acts
Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a cinematic look into our desire to tame time
Isaac Hans is a visual artist and photographer based out of Colorado Springs. Influenced by the history of American road trip photography, his work focuses around ideas of longing, spirituality, and the mundane.
