SPACE-STATES AND OTHER REALMS
online catalog available here: https://issuu.com/jackietileston/docs/space-states_and_other_realmspdf
For millennia, mystics, psychonauts, and artists have attempted to express their direct experiences with non-ordinary states or consciousness and other dimensions. The imaginal, entheogenic, and speculative interact and catalyze each other in so many dynamic and mesmerizing ways, and this group of artists is actively engaged in translating these realms into form.
While the expected image bank for “psychedelic” art often registers as an illustration or postcard of the trip report, a sort of Fantastic Realism, we are deliberately opening the vocabulary to offer work that expands our consciousness by using the aesthetic experience to allow us access to these other realms and states of being. Conceptual and visual experiments generate new possibilities for the viewer, and paradigms become deliciously slippery under our feet. Gnosis happens in all kinds of ways.
In 1956 the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term psychedelic, deriving it from the Greek psyche – soul, mind, and deloun – to manifest, to open. This could relate to all artistic efforts to depict the inner world, not just those precipitated by ingesting a mind-altering substance. At its best, art is a psychoactive phenomenon that inherently alters consciousness.
In his book Are you Experienced: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art, critic Ken Johnson talks about “how consciousness abstracts and organizes sensory input.” According to his theory, psychedelics “activate exactly the functions of consciousness that we rely on to produce art and to represent experience, memory, and fantasy in formally intelligible and illuminating ways.”
The artists included in Space-States and Other Realms use architecture, abstraction, patterning, and symbols of mythical and theoretical origins to construct images of subtle invisible phenomena, theoretical shapes of the universe, mystical creatures, and microcosmic vibratory events. Humor, imagination, and speculation pulsate beneath the works. As immersion into non-ordinary experiences transform knowledge, we can ask how future generations will embody their direct experiences of expanded realities.
This essay was written for the exhbition in conjunction with the Philadelic Conference on Psychedelic Research at University of Pennsylvania, July 2023, www.philadelic.org