Politics, religion and money: three topics we’ve all been admonished to avoid when engaging in polite discourse. It’s not bad advice. These topics tend to get everyone riled up. Yet as the holidays approach, with promises of eggnog, ugly sweaters and banal conversations, one Charlotte native doesn’t care about being polite. Sean Busher, a successful commercial photographer and visual artist, is out to push buttons and boundaries by putting his ideas about religion and evolution front and center with his Descent of Man exhibition.

“It’s my idea that a spiritual practice and an appreciation of science can coexist, 100 percent, without one negating the other,” Busher said.

The Descent of Man showcase is an eight-piece labor of love for Sean and his creative partner, Peter Godshaw that depicts Jesus coming to earth to teach evolution to humanity.

“In this project I used Jesus as a metaphor to represent a relationship with God, or a spiritual sense of the world, coming down and teaching evolution, to show that spirituality and science can coexist,” Busher said.

Sean and Peter created The Descent of Man show first and foremost as a way to encourage dialogue, but they also embarked on this five year, 1,000 hour tour de force as a way to improve their skills as artists, hone their technical prowess and show the world the full range of their creativity. And that meant having the patience and dedication to make sure no detail was overlooked.

“It took time to create these images, and then finesse them and massage them until we got them to look just the way we wanted… then when we though they were finished, we’d find a whole mess of issues we’d want to correct,” Busher said. “We spent the time and made sure we didn’t have any regrets and made this our masterpiece.”

The results of Sean and Peter’s obsessive attention to detail were on display in full effect at the Descent of Man exhibit at Wedgewood Church, located on the corner of Wedgewood Drive and Tyvola Road, but only through last Friday. Print sales have now begun.

“I wanted to host the exhibit at a Christian church, because I wanted to push some buttons for the religious people who may feel that the idea of evolution takes away from their relationship with God. I’m really trying to encourage people to find that middle ground, and I thought that was most likely to happen at a Christian church.” Busher says.

And you can always go online to thedescentofman.net to see all eight high-resolution images and read the story behind the exhibition.

Despite being swamped with regular work for their commercial clients Sean and Peter always have at least one passion project in the mix. Producing unique personal projects helps them keep their creative juices flowing and allows them to showcase the true extent of their skill set on their terms.

“We do a lot of creative things for other people all the time… ultimately we want to be able to do things that put us out there in a different way. We want to do things that push us in different ways that clients don’t even know are possible. People don’t know what you can do until you do it.” Says Busher.

Keep an eye out for their next project, a cutting edge time-lapse project combining multiple viewpoints revolving around a next-level showcase of Uptown Charlotte.

(Photo credit: Cover image via Sean Busher)