Melvin Charney is a senior Canadian artist with a cross-disciplinary approach. His original training as an architect has informed virtually all of his art production. Charney is known for large-scale public interventions in the landscape that comment on the relationship between humans and architecture.

In 1989, Charney began his Parable Series, which involved taking photographs of newspaper images and combining them with visions of modernist architecture. Parable No. 25…RE:Visions of the Temple, is a work from this series which makes reference to the lost Temple of Jerusalem. The Biblical Temple of Jerusalem has been of interest to artists for centuries, and there are many speculations as to its form. Charney offers his own interpretation, painted on top of a wire-service news photo of a religious group constructing an illegal settlement on disputed territory near Jerusalem. The work makes use of the symbolic ideal of the Temple to comment on ethnic land conflicts and the role of the media in the formation of public opinion.