Hive Culture and Shamanic Illuminations

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Apiphobia (2011) by Anonda Bell.

A couple of exhibitions opening this week for those in the New York area. Hive Culture: Captivated by the Honeybee is at the Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill where 18 artists present works inspired by our favourite pollinating insects:

Painting, prints, sculpture, photography and video are featured, by artists Jennifer Angus, Anonda Bell, Deborah Davidovits, Anda Dubinskis, Cara Enteles, Rose-Lynn Fisher, Sally Gall, Hope Ginsburg, Talia Greene, Judi Harvest, Rob Keller, Andrea Lilienthal, Holly Lynton, Lenore Malen, Julia Oldham, Michelle Rozic, Jeanne Silverthorne and Draga Šušanj.

This isn’t solely an art exhibition. In October Wave Hill will be staging a series of bee- and honey-related events, details of which can be found on their press release (PDF).

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El Encanto de las Piedras by Pablo Amaringo.

Over at the ACA Galleries, Shamanic Illuminations which opens on Thursday will feature the art of Pablo Amaringo, Alex Grey and Mieshiel. There’s little detail at the moment on their website but they have a preview of the paintings including a number of Amaringo’s vivid, ayahuasca-inspired works which are psychedelic in every sense of the word. Shamanic Illuminations runs from September 15 to October 22. Via Phantasmaphile.

Alchemically Yours

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Ars, Scientia, Magia (2007) by Jesse Bransford.

Another art exhibition, and another group show at Observatory in Brooklyn, NYC, where some of my Lovecraft drawings were shown last year. Alchemically Yours is an alchemy-themed contemporary art show curated by Phantasmaphile‘s Pam Grossman, and she has this to say about the exhibition:

Like dreams, alchemy speaks in pictures. At first glimpse, alchemical manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries look like a panoply of hallucinations. They feature images of fornicating kings and queens. Suns and moons shining in stereo. Lions and serpents and eggs, oh my. Black and white and red all over. Secret codes and effulgent iconographies teeming with meaning, yet ultimately ineffable. These pictures beget picturing. They’re signs that beg to be resignified; to be reinterpreted and refined.

The participants in Alchemically Yours have done just that. Varying in medium and style, each piece in this exhibition pays homage to the alchemic tradition—all the while affirming that the artist fills the role of alchemist in the present-day. For who better can elevate the mundane, turn the sub- into the sublime? From the prima materia of color and canvas comes great and vivid work.

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Caduceus (detail, 2011) by Robert M. Place.

The participating artists are Jesse Bransford, Molly Crabapple, Ted Enik, Marina Korenfeld, Adela Leibowitz, Sara Antoinette Martin, Ann McCoy, Robert M. Place, Ron Regé, Jr., J.L. Schnabel, Hunter Stabler, Panos Tsagaris.

Alchemically Yours opens on Saturday, May 7th, 2011, 7–10pm and will run from May 8th to June 12th, 2011.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Laurie Lipton’s Splendor Solis
The Arms of the Art
Splendor Solis
Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae
A Love Craft: Art Inspired by Monsters, Madness and Mythos
Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia
Vision Quest
Digital alchemy
Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists

Laurie Lipton’s Splendor Solis

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Splendor Solis: Winged (1989).

Following from the post earlier this month about the Splendor Solis series of alchemical plates, Thom draws my attention to a contemporary reworking by American artist Laurie Lipton. I seem to recall seeing one of these at Phantasmaphile but didn’t think at the time to see whether Ms Lipton had any similar work. She does indeed have similar work, her own versions of the entire series of plates, all of them detailed drawings produced with coloured pencils. See the full set here. Thanks Thom!

Previously on { feuilleton }
The Arms of the Art
Splendor Solis

Weekend links 43

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From the video for I See, So I See So by Broadcast.

RIP Trish Keenan of Broadcast. Tributes here and here. The Broadcast/Focus Group collaboration …investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age was The Wire‘s album of the year for 2009. Joseph Stannard interviewed Trish Keenan and James Cargill in October of that year.

Who Knows What Tomorrow Might Bring, a new pay-what-you-please Arthur mixtape. Also at Arthur, Sunday Lectures by Freeman House here, here, here and here.

• Cormac McCarthy’s description of American pioneers in Suttree (1979) kept coming to mind during the past week:

Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark’s total restitution could appease.

Born This Way: “A photo/essay project for gay viewers (male and female) to submit pictures from their childhood (roughly ages 4 to 14), with snapshots that capture them, innocently, showing the beginnings of their innate LGBT selves. It’s nature, not nurture!”

Mischievous street art characters. Chris Marker wouldn’t want us to forget Monsieur Chat. Speaking of Chris Marker, there’s Plato’s Cave as Kino: Owl’s Legacy Excerpt & Becoming Imperceptible.

With the point of a knife Dr. LeBaron took from the little round box a small quantity of a dark, greenish-colored gum, which, as it was passed from one to another for inspection, gave off an agreeable, aromatic odor. Then, as he was engaged in filling two capsules from the box, he explained:

“As le docteur read from ze book of Monsieur Richet, ze favoreet méthode in ze Orient ees to take ze Haschisch by ze smoke in ze Persian pipe—ze hookah, ze nargileh. But zey also take eet in ze great varieté. Ze principal kind zat come to ze market of Europe, ees zat I show you—ze Haschisch, an’ ve take eet like ze dose of quinine,” said he, as he handed a well-filled capsule to both Smith and Arnold.

Throwing back his head, Smith bolted his dose without ceremony, and Arnold immediately followed his example.

Haschisch: A Novel (1886) by Thorold King. Related: Haschisch Hallucinations (1905) by HE Gowers.

• Dan Hill’s personal report from the drowned world of Brisbane. Related: Hayley Campbell recalls swimming in the city’s hazardous floodwaters when she was a wild child. Also: Canoeing in McDonald’s.

Cabinet Card Backmarks, florid advertisements from Victorian cabinet photos. Callum James made a post on the subject in 2008 and has a Flickr set showing his discoveries.

• The Brothers Quay made a public information film about AIDS in 1996. (Now deleted from YouTube…boo!)

The secret stories of book inscriptions. Related: The Book Inscriptions Project.

• Ani, Turkey: City of 1001 Churches, all of them abandoned and ruined.

Vulgar Army: Octopus in Propaganda and Political Cartoons.

• Designer John Gall makes collages in his spare time.

Phantasmaphile at Tumblr.

Witch Cults and I See, So I See So, both by Broadcast & The Focus Group.