Visions of Gold

“Visions of Gold is the third painting in the Sanctioned Blindness series. It asks the viewer to look carefully at the evidence on which the founding claim of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints rests.

The background is built entirely from hand-made gold papers, layer upon layer of metallic warmth that surrounds the figure and saturates the image. Gold is the operative word in the founding narrative. The plates Joseph Smith claimed to find and translated were gold. The treasure he spent years seeking before his prophetic career was gold. The objects in his hands in this painting are not gold and not plates. They are the artist’s assessment of what the evidence supports.

Joseph Smith’s history as a treasure seeker is documented in court records. In 1826 he was tried as a glass looker, charging money to locate buried treasure using seer stones. By his own testimony at trial, he had never once found any. The method documented in the translation of the Book of Mormon, a seer stone placed in a hat, is consistent with the treasure seeking practice for which he was tried in 1826.

Of the eleven witnesses whose testimonies appear in every copy of the Book of Mormon, four were eventually excommunicated, including all three of the primary witnesses, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris. Two of those three were later rebaptized. The accounts of those who left varied considerably across different tellings. The plates were returned to the angel Moroni before anyone outside Joseph Smith’s immediate circle could examine them independently.

Joseph Smith also claimed to translate Egyptian papyri, producing what became the Book of Abraham. Those papyri still exist. Egyptologists have identified them as the Book of Breathings, an ancient Egyptian funerary document with no connection to Abraham. The church’s explanation is that the translation was received by revelation rather than from the text of the papyri itself. The gold plates cannot be evaluated because they are gone.

The painting was rendered from reference material derived from the daguerreotype discovered in 2022 within a Smith family locket, identified by the historians who examined it as the only known photographic image of Joseph Smith.”