You are here

Paulina Peavy: Etherian Channeler

Country:

Categories:

Exhibition Type:

How many exhibition works:

Price Range: 
$7000 to
$30000
Date: 
Saturday, 5 June 2021 to Saturday, 31 July 2021

Keywords:

Beyond Baroque’s Mike Kelley Gallery presents Paulina Peavy: An Etherian Channeler her first show on the West Coast in over 75 years. Paulina Peavy’s (1901–1999) path as an artist depended on convening with beings and forces beyond the visible plane to create her work, similar to the artists Hilma af Klint, Forrest Bess, and Agnes Pelton. Peavy’s story is unprecedented among the mediumist artist cannon as she claimed to channel a discarnate entity named Lacamo who “travelled on an etherian ship.” This positioned her as a key emissary of the astroculture age.

Peavy’s roots in California, where she lived and painted from 1923 to 1943, were deeply embedded in the emerging abstract art scene of the 1920s, where enthusiastic explorations of the occult were embraced. A student of Hans Hofmann at Chouinard Art Institute in 1931, she moved with members of the occult-inclined Group of Eight as well as the Synchromists, the first abstract art movement in America and was part of the circle of California’s post surrealists led by Lorser Feitelson. Beginning in the late 1920s, Peavy played a vital role in the emerging West Coast art scene. She established a gallery and showed these artists’ works alongside her own. The gallery was also a school, and salon under her name, where she hosted classes of the foundational Los Angeles Art Students League .

In California Peavy showed at some of the most significant galleries of her time, including the Stendahl Gallery in Los Angeles. She was included in the opening of the San Francisco Museum of Art, and thirty of her paintings were exhibited during the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40, where Diego Rivera exhibited mural work. Peavy had close alliances with muralists, such as Orozco, and like them shared a fascination with hermetic traditions.

In the early 1930s Peavy became a member of a Spiritual Science congregation (later the Cosmic Unity Church No. 9) led by Ida L. Ewing in Santa Ana. It was there that she first channeled Lacamo, her astrocultural entity. Lacamo revealed layers of wisdom based on a cosmology of 12,000-year cycles with 3,000-year seasons, in the process guiding her to create paintings she often co-signed with Lacamo. In order to channel Lacamo she made elaborate masks that combine surrealist touches with indigenous themes. Peavy masked herself with a composite representation of humanity to communicate with the unseen world. Peavy’s cosmology merged ancient hermetic philosophies with the astroculture age. This exhibition will explore the complex intersection of these phenomena and their foretelling of a utopian future accomplished through the dissolution of gender.

Peavy’s paintings use layering in ways unique to the art canon. Beginning in the 1930s, each of the multiple layers she added created new layers of meaning over a successive fifty-year timeframe. Guided by Lacamo, each layer symbolically represents a new revelation, thereby activating the viewer’s ability to convene with the unknown. The final layers, completed in the 1980s, present abstracted crystalline formations as a way to equip the viewer with the tools to receive and absorb Lacamo’s wisdom.

Peavy was encouraged to move to Manhattan after the positive response to her 1935 exhibit at Delphic Studios in New York City, a gallery that exhibited work by the Agnes Pelton and other members of the Transcedental Painting Group. She permanently settled there in 1943 contributing to the city’s atmosphere when the Surrealist emigrée community was transforming American culture. Peavy lived and worked in New York until close to the end of her life. She died in Bethesda, Maryland in 1999, at the age of 98 years old, a witness to nearly the entire twentieth century.

This exhibition will be the first showing of her work in California since 1943 and will preview Label Curatorial’s scholarship and research from a forthcoming publication. On display are nine early channeled paintings from the 1930s. These paintings evolved layers over time, until their completion in the late 1980s. Also included are Peavy’s intricate works on paper; these invoke magical writing to present abstract cartographic portals to other worlds. Peavy’s masks, writing, poetry will be on display while her award-winning films detailing the complexities of her cosmology will be playing in the theatre.

A rare book collection once belonging to White Star library from the collection of Bob Fisher will also be presented. First edition books include Manly P.Hall, Annie Besant, Alice Bailey, Madame Blavatsky, George Van Tassel and other rare hermetic and astroculture publications. These publications will offer an ontological dialogue with Peavy’s own manuscripts. Another ephemera case assembled by Peavy’s research director on the forthcoming publication Narin Dickerson will also be on display in the book store.

Curator :

Artist ( Description ): 

Beyond Baroque’s Mike Kelley Gallery presents Paulina Peavy: An Etherian Channeler her first show on the West Coast in over 75 years. Paulina Peavy’s (1901–1999) path as an artist depended on convening with beings and forces beyond the visible plane to create her work, similar to the artists Hilma af Klint, Forrest Bess, and Agnes Pelton. Peavy’s story is unprecedented among the mediumist artist cannon as she claimed to channel a discarnate entity named Lacamo who “travelled on an etherian ship.” This positioned her as a key emissary of the astroculture age.

Peavy’s roots in California, where she lived and painted from 1923 to 1943, were deeply embedded in the emerging abstract art scene of the 1920s, where enthusiastic explorations of the occult were embraced. A student of Hans Hofmann at Chouinard Art Institute in 1931, she moved with members of the occult-inclined Group of Eight as well as the Synchromists, the first abstract art movement in America and was part of the circle of California’s post surrealists led by Lorser Feitelson. Beginning in the late 1920s, Peavy played a vital role in the emerging West Coast art scene. She established a gallery and showed these artists’ works alongside her own. The gallery was also a school, and salon under her name, where she hosted classes of the foundational Los Angeles Art Students League .

In California Peavy showed at some of the most significant galleries of her time, including the Stendahl Gallery in Los Angeles. She was included in the opening of the San Francisco Museum of Art, and thirty of her paintings were exhibited during the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-40, where Diego Rivera exhibited mural work. Peavy had close alliances with muralists, such as Orozco, and like them shared a fascination with hermetic traditions.

In the early 1930s Peavy became a member of a Spiritual Science congregation (later the Cosmic Unity Church No. 9) led by Ida L. Ewing in Santa Ana. It was there that she first channeled Lacamo, her astrocultural entity. Lacamo revealed layers of wisdom based on a cosmology of 12,000-year cycles with 3,000-year seasons, in the process guiding her to create paintings she often co-signed with Lacamo. In order to channel Lacamo she made elaborate masks that combine surrealist touches with indigenous themes. Peavy masked herself with a composite representation of humanity to communicate with the unseen world. Peavy’s cosmology merged ancient hermetic philosophies with the astroculture age. This exhibition will explore the complex intersection of these phenomena and their foretelling of a utopian future accomplished through the dissolution of gender.

Peavy’s paintings use layering in ways unique to the art canon. Beginning in the 1930s, each of the multiple layers she added created new layers of meaning over a successive fifty-year timeframe. Guided by Lacamo, each layer symbolically represents a new revelation, thereby activating the viewer’s ability to convene with the unknown. The final layers, completed in the 1980s, present abstracted crystalline formations as a way to equip the viewer with the tools to receive and absorb Lacamo’s wisdom.

Peavy was encouraged to move to Manhattan after the positive response to her 1935 exhibit at Delphic Studios in New York City, a gallery that exhibited work by the Agnes Pelton and other members of the Transcedental Painting Group. She permanently settled there in 1943 contributing to the city’s atmosphere when the Surrealist emigrée community was transforming American culture. Peavy lived and worked in New York until close to the end of her life. She died in Bethesda, Maryland in 1999, at the age of 98 years old, a witness to nearly the entire twentieth century.

This exhibition will be the first showing of her work in California since 1943 and will preview Label Curatorial’s scholarship and research from a forthcoming publication. On display are nine early channeled paintings from the 1930s. These paintings evolved layers over time, until their completion in the late 1980s. Also included are Peavy’s intricate works on paper; these invoke magical writing to present abstract cartographic portals to other worlds. Peavy’s masks, writing, poetry will be on display while her award-winning films detailing the complexities of her cosmology will be playing in the theatre.

A rare book collection once belonging to White Star library from the collection of Bob Fisher will also be presented. First edition books include Manly P.Hall, Annie Besant, Alice Bailey, Madame Blavatsky, George Van Tassel and other rare hermetic and astroculture publications. These publications will offer an ontological dialogue with Peavy’s own manuscripts. Another ephemera case assembled by Peavy’s research director on the forthcoming publication Narin Dickerson will also be on display in the book store.

Venue ( Address ): 

681 Venice Blvd, Venice, CA 90291

Other events from laura whitcomb

view
Paulina Peavy: Etherian Channeler
06/05/2021 to 07/31/2021

 

Related Shows This Week

view
Five Elements: Bill Pangburn's Rivers
03/01/2024 to 03/30/2024
view
YRNEH GABON: Spirit Leads Me
02/24/2024 to 04/13/2024
view
THE FUTURE OF THE FIGURE: Laguna College of Art + Design BFA Candidates in Drawing + Painting
03/28/2024 to 03/31/2024
view
Thinkspace Projects Presents Five New Exhibitions in March
03/09/2024 to 03/30/2024
view
Abi Joy Samuels: 4' 33"
03/02/2024 to 03/30/2024
view
Miracle Island - Paintings by KK Kozik
03/30/2024 to 05/12/2024
view
Oldies and Goodies
03/07/2024 to 04/08/2024
view
BEYOND THE STREETS & CONTROL GALLERY PRESENT GRAFFITI ARCHIVE 1972/73: AN EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS FROM GORDON MATTA-CLARK
03/01/2024 to 04/13/2024

Pages