Prayer Can’t Just Be Asking
Ben Sloat
September 12 – October 10, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 12, 5:00–8:00 PM
One Mile Gallery
Kingston, New York
One Mile Gallery is pleased to present Prayer Can’t Just Be Asking, a new site-specific installation by multidisciplinary artist Ben Sloat, on view from September 12 through October 10, 2026. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Saturday, September 12, from 5:00–8:00 PM.
Working across installation, sculpture, photography, light, and language, Sloat has long explored the ways cultural symbols accumulate meaning, creating spaces where personal experience intersects with shared ritual. Born in New York and of Taiwanese-American heritage, Sloat’s practice draws upon diverse visual traditions while investigating the power of iconography, architecture, and ceremony to shape our understanding of community, memory, and belonging. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Havana Biennial, Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Queens Museum, and the Peabody Essex Museum, among many others. He currently serves as the founding director of the MFA in Visual Arts program at Clark University.
For Prayer Can’t Just Be Asking, Sloat transforms One Mile Gallery into a contemplative environment that invites visitors to experience prayer not as doctrine, but as an embodied act of attention. Bamboo structures weave throughout the gallery, creating an architectural framework that is at once shelter, passageway, and meditation space. At its center, a luminous neon bodhisattva is suspended within a frame of weathered nautical rope, establishing a dialogue between the technological and the organic, the manufactured and the elemental. The installation resists easy oppositions, instead suggesting that spiritual experience is always mediated through the materials of the everyday.
Rather than presenting prayer as a request directed toward a particular deity or outcome, Sloat asks what prayer becomes when it is understood as presence, generosity, release, or intention. Visitors are invited to inhabit the installation quietly, participating in a work that unfolds through individual gestures and shared experience.
Central to the exhibition is the use of incense as both material and ritual. During a recent trip to Taiwan, Sloat collected locally made incense as well as ash from a Taoist temple—a substance he describes as the residue of countless previous prayers. Throughout the exhibition, visitors will have the opportunity to light incense of their own, allowing their prayers, hopes, and reflections to mingle physically with those carried across the Pacific. The accumulating ash becomes a living archive of intention: an evolving record of everyone who has entered the space and chosen to participate.
Visitors are invited to leave a small offering—not to any specific religious figure, but as an act of generosity or relinquishment. Whether a found object, a handwritten note, or another modest token, these offerings become part of the exhibition’s evolving landscape, transforming the gallery into a place where contemplation is made tangible through collective participation.
Throughout his career, Sloat has created works that blur distinctions between sculpture, architecture, and social space. Rather than asking viewers to observe from a distance, his installations encourage a slower mode of engagement in which meaning emerges through presence, movement, and ritual. Prayer Can’t Just Be Asking continues this trajectory, proposing that contemporary art can function not only as something to be seen, but as something to be inhabited.
The exhibition follows One Mile Gallery’s recent series of immersive installations while marking a distinct shift toward a quieter register. Here, the gallery becomes less an exhibition space than a temporary sanctuary—one shaped not only by the artist’s materials and vision, but also by the accumulated gestures of those who enter it. As incense burns, offerings gather, and the atmosphere slowly changes over the course of the exhibition, the work reminds us that prayer is perhaps less about asking for transformation than about creating the conditions in which transformation can occur.
About the Artist
Ben Sloat is a multidisciplinary artist whose work investigates ritual, material culture, memory, and the ways that objects and symbols mediate human experience. Working across installation, sculpture, photography, and public art, he creates immersive environments that encourage reflection and participation. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Havana Biennial (Cuba), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Queens Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Peabody Essex Museum. He is the founding director of the MFA in Visual Arts program at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
About One Mile Gallery
One Mile Gallery is a contemporary art space in Kingston, New York, dedicated to presenting ambitious exhibitions that foster sustained engagement between artists, artworks, and audiences. Through installation, performance, and interdisciplinary practice, the gallery seeks to create experiences that extend beyond the traditional exhibition format and encourage new ways of inhabiting contemporary art.
One Mile Gallery
Kingston, New York
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 12, 2026 | 5:00–8:00 PM
Exhibition Dates: September 12 – October 10, 2026
