Jack the Pelican is pleased to present “Altered States,” an exhibition combining the sculptures of Joe Meiser and the paintings of Adrian Hatfield. Both have exhibited extensively throughout the U.S. but are showing in New York City for the first time ever.

The show takes its title from the 1980s film, directed by Ken Russell, about a scientific researcher’s disastrous investigations into states of consciousness.

Joe Meiser has built a personal mythology around his endeavors to achieve transcendence. Like the guy in the film, he makes a ritual of sensory deprivation. He descends into the tank. (He built it himself). His ‘subjects’ go in too (not at the same time). Like a scientist, he records.

But science is rooted in verification of the senses, he points out, and the immaterial which concerns him is necessarily beyond the senses. He is refreshingly straightforward about his observations and visions, as he is about the objects he makes.

The eight-foot-tall Homage to the Being of Light saturates the viewer with the experience. The giant horse welded out of steel came to him in a dream. The history of parapsychology and world religions are viewed through the lens of a contemporary American vernacular.

Adrian Hatfield shares Meiser’s interest in the limits and possibilities of science and religion. He primarily focuses on how we infuse subjects of science with notions of the sublime rooted in the 19th century romantic tradition.

He notes that we cannot really see primitive life or faraway solar systems, but they seem so real to us. Colorizing effects are added to imagery harvested from the Hubble telescope to amplify and differentiate what can be seen. This is typical of how we digest vast amounts of data. How we imagine it is all so constructed.

Hatfield, in his paintings, hopes to engage the ingenuity, strength and inherent beauty of science's visual language, while simultaneously exposing its limitations.

He writes, “When I paint a prehistoric scene, I want it to be as fantastic as possible without becoming obvious fiction. The piece should operate not only as an alluring image, but also as a metaphor exposing our most trusted systems as simulacra.”

In the end is our apprehension of something truly vast.

Joe Meiser and Adrian Hatfield met in the MFA program at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Meiser graduated in 2006, Hatfield in 2003. Meiser is currently an instructor at the School of Art at Bowling Green State University. Adrian Hatfield lives and works in Detroit.