The Pagans: Effigies, Graven Images & Sublime Enchantments

January 9, 2025 – February 1, 2025

Opening Thurs. Jan. 9th, 2025:   6 – 8 pm

Viktoriya Basina, Miguel Otero Fuentes, Pablo Garcia, Judy Glantzman, Amy Hill, Julian Kalwinowski, Tine Kinderman, Dario Mohr, Sean O’Connor, Andrew Cornell Robinson, Wade Schaming, Manju Shandler, Carri Skoczek, Christopher Tanner, Patricia Watwood 

Canto IV

Circle one: Limbo (Virtuous pagans)

A monstrous clap of thunder broke apart

The swoon that stuffed my head; like one awakened

By violent hands, I leaped up with a start.

And having risen; rested and renewed,

I studied out the landmarks of the gloom

To find my bearing there as best as I could.

Overview:

For me, and I assume for you, the world, afore confusing at best, has taken a baffling turn and fallen far short of what we had hoped and wanted it to be. Our response?  We know we must go on but how?  

I offer art; its devoted and fearless makers are well practiced in managing the disconnect between aspirational imagining and the less-than-ideal physical manifestation of their best efforts.  Over time, artists come to better understand this ideal whilst simultaneously accepting their flawed relation to it.  Paradoxically, this radical and epiphanic acceptance propels the artist forward given the realization that what really matters is the very striving towards the vision.  And art maps the way.

So with the world.  

Beams of fierce light in the gloom, the artists in “Pagans” occupy the present with a battery of glittering shrines, icons, shape-shifting chimeras, avenging angels and assorted talismans to charge up your warring spirit and bid you to return to tribal weirdo eccentricity.  Join them as they aspire and conspire to an absurd degree in a world-wide community of likeminded free-spirits and know that your power to advance humanity is grander then and untethered to the illusion of fleeting fancies and causes of the moment.