Lord, just give me sign!

FIRE AND brimstone messages that she read as a kid from the back seat of the family car put the fear of God into West Chester photographer Stephanie Kirk - and the fear of church signs.

"They were often punitive. Mean," she said. "I can't in my heart of hearts believe that God's mean or nasty."

Kirk, raised in an interfaith household - Catholic and Eastern Orthodox - grew up to become a Quaker. And those dread-inducing church signs stayed in her mind. "As an adult, I said, I have to go back and explore that."

Her color photographs of church signs, many local, are now the centerpiece of the art exhibit "And the word is . . ." at the Gershman Y, which explores how the word of God - actual words from the sacred texts of various religious - is being incorporated into art by contemporary painters, sculptors and photographers.

A grid of 78 of Kirk's photos cover a wall of the exhibit space, beckoning with messages that are alternatively inspirational ("Your heavenly father is loaded, and you're in his will"), clever ("Down in the mouth? Come in for a faith lift") and foreboding ("And you think it's hot here!").

The assortment also includes a timely nod to local baseball fans: "Believing in the Phillies won't get you eternal life."

"Those signs are basically everywhere we are," Kirk said. "I photographed them on the way to dance class, to the gym, to school." Beyond cataloging them, she hoped to raise questions in viewers' minds about who writes these messages and whether they are received by drivers-by as the actual voice of God.

Other artists in the "And the word is . . ." show incorporate the words of God as design elements:

* Artist Sandow Birk paints gorgeous illuminated manuscripts designed around hand-lettered passages from the Qu'ran.

* Sculptor Carole Kunstadt repackages her grandfather's Old Testament into a series of glittering gold-leaf objects.

* "Conceptual sculptors" Johanna Bresnick and Michael Cloud Hirschfeld dice passages from Leviticus into digestible nuggets - encased inside kosher pill capsules.

So, yes, we've come a long way from those tablets that Moses brought down from the mount.

The show came about when curator Susan Isaacs, who teaches at Towson University, "started seeing a trend and realizing that a lot of artists were dealing with spiritual texts," said Gershman executive director Maxine Gaiber. The two worked together to bring the works to Philly.

Also on display are industrial-size Braille tablets of Biblical parables sculpted by local artist David Stephens, a painter and printmaker who turned to sculpting after losing his sight . . . and impossibly teensy, painstakingly hand-lettered lists of book titles from Amazon.com that include the word "God." (Artist Martin Brief has collected 700,000 citations, not all of them in this show.)

Tyler School of Art professor Nicholas Kripal's sculpture of the word "LUST," as discussed in the book of Matthew, sits on the gallery floor.

Special performances and lectures tied to the show include a 1 1/2-hour dance production Sunday (2 p.m., $10-$20) by New York's Ariel Rivka Dance, based on the stories of Queen Vashti and Queen Esther.