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ARTCAT



Love’s Secret Domain

3rd Ward
195 Morgan Avenue, 718.715.4961
Bushwick/Ridgewood
June 8 - June 24, 2007
Reception: Thursday, June 8, 7 - 10 PM
Web Site


Love’s Secret Domain is a show on contemporary psychedelic art. Curated by Seze Devres and Tracey Norman, Love’s Secret Domain presents the work of 18 artists all working in diverse disciplines but finding a common ground in the exploration of heightened states of mind and the boundaries of the visual. It is art inspired by drugs, yes, but it is art that uses that inspiration as its relevant point of reference rather than its definition.

Art and drugs having a close relationship is nothing new. The Symbolists glorified their opium-induced visions; Walter Benjamin made explicit the corollary between Surrealism and hashish; the Situationist drift owes as much to binges of ether and alcohol as it does to Marxist theory; and the party culture that surrounded Warhol and the Factory is an obvious confluence of art, celebrity, decadence, and drugs. Continually then, both art and drugs find common ground in the aspiration to a transcendent, ecstatic state. But whereas drugs are by definition bodily in their influence and thus individual in their effect, art explores the same terrain aesthetically, visually, and potentially universally. Its transcendence is one of the sacred become communal. Psychedelic art explores the science of the possibilities of the inner world, the Renaissance discovery of perspective is not simply bested by hallucinogenic visions; those visions are its logical inheritor.

Love’s Secret Domain showcases a wide-body of psychedelic art: Julie Evans’ mystical spirograph paintings, Miriam Brumer’s amorphic dreamscapes, Lorenzo de Los Angeles and Cotter Luppi’s intricate pencil drawings, Debra Hampton’s mixed-media drawings of explosive feminine forms, and Heung-Heung Chin’s kaleidoscopic and rhapsodic animal-world dominion. There are hallucinatory pieces that illustrate the wide spectrum of the subconscious as seen in the video work of the dynamic duos Robyn Voshardt & Sven Humphrey and Aziz & Cucher, a minimal techno music video for Ambivalent by Ali M. Demirel (broadcasted in low fi You Tube format), the magical Electric Sheep animations of Scott Draves, and the light installations of Deniz Kurtel. Also on view are the vibratory geometric color burst paintings of Jeff Perrott and Jason Voegele, a chemical drip camera-less photo by Curtis Mitchell, Seze Devres’ ketamine photograms, and David Last’s large-scale drawing that attempts to visualize sound. In addition, the exhibition will include a blotter paper print by electronic and industrial music luminary J.G. Thirlwell.

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