Jesse Bransford – Page 2

Lunation: Art on the Moon

Image by Noah Doely.

Steve Moore’s lunarian occult novel Somnium was published a couple of months ago, and now we have an art exhibition exploring similar themes. Lunation: Art on the Moon is a group show at Observatory, Brooklyn, NYC which opens on January 7th:

Artists portray the moon as a source of danger and power, and latter-day sorceresses and men of magic call up to that heavenly lamp, seeking to transcend the ordinary night. For them, the old myths have not changed so much: the moon is still a secret mirror, showing in pale light how the familiar contains always an element of the unexpected…

Participants include Grace Baxter, Jesse Bransford, Susan Crawford, Noah Doely, Joanna Ebenstein, Theo Ellsworth, Michelle Enemark, Ted Enik, Jesse Gelaznik, Ethan Gould, Dr. Gary Greenberg, Pam Grossman, Maria Liebana, Gerald Marks, Chad Merritt, Heidi Neilson, G.F. Newland, Rebeca Olguín, Kathryn Pierce, Lado Pochkhua, Dylan Thuras, Binky Walker, James Walsh and Julianne Zaleta.

Lunation: Art on the Moon runs to the end of February, 2012.

The Lake at Night by Jesse Gelaznik (2011).

Salvio Hexia by Chad Merritt (2011).

A gigantic space-man has landed on the moon, but why?! by Theo Ellsworth (2011).

Luna by Jesse Bransford (2009).

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Somnium by Steve Moore
• Blood on the Moon
• Filippo Morghen’s Voyage to the Moon

Secret Societies and Spirit Boards

Komposition für einen Rhombus (2007) by Fabian Marti.

Fabian Marti’s print is one of the few works that stood out for me in the press materials for the Secret Societies exhibition which has just opened at the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux:

[Secret Societies] deals with the general theme of secret societies through the prism of contemporary art in the current context of media super-exposure – from WikiLeaks to Credit Rating Agencies (CRA), just to quote two current examples. Artists have always been fascinated by the unknown and the occult. But unlike journalists who are mainly focused on investigating present-day news, artists work around the mechanisms of the secret and are better equipped to question the very limits of the ideology of transparency in our era of super-exposure.

Unfortunately many of the works look like the customary state of affairs, with a bunch of contemporary artists doing their usual schtick and not really questioning (familiar gallery buzzword) anything much at all. On the plus side they have a screening of Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of My Demon Brother, and also a contribution from Cerith Wyn Evans whose Acephalé reworks in neon the André Masson design for Georges Bataille’s Surrealist secret society. Gary Lachman has created an audio guide for the exhibition which is curated by Cristina Ricupero and Alexis Vaillant, and which runs until February 26th, 2012.

For a more determinedly occult showing this month, there’s Spirit Board curated by JL Schnabel at the Articulated Gallery, San Francisco. And elsewhere I’d recommend the work of Scott Treleaven and Jesse Bransford.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of Scott Treleaven

Alchemically Yours

Ars, Scientia, Magia (2007) by Jesse Bransford.

Another art exhibition, and another group show at Observatory in Brooklyn, NYC, where some of my Lovecraft drawings were shown last year. Alchemically Yours is an alchemy-themed contemporary art show curated by Phantasmaphile‘s Pam Grossman, and she has this to say about the exhibition:

Like dreams, alchemy speaks in pictures. At first glimpse, alchemical manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries look like a panoply of hallucinations. They feature images of fornicating kings and queens. Suns and moons shining in stereo. Lions and serpents and eggs, oh my. Black and white and red all over. Secret codes and effulgent iconographies teeming with meaning, yet ultimately ineffable. These pictures beget picturing. They’re signs that beg to be resignified; to be reinterpreted and refined.

The participants in Alchemically Yours have done just that. Varying in medium and style, each piece in this exhibition pays homage to the alchemic tradition—all the while affirming that the artist fills the role of alchemist in the present-day. For who better can elevate the mundane, turn the sub- into the sublime? From the prima materia of color and canvas comes great and vivid work.

Caduceus (detail, 2011) by Robert M. Place.

The participating artists are Jesse Bransford, Molly Crabapple, Ted Enik, Marina Korenfeld, Adela Leibowitz, Sara Antoinette Martin, Ann McCoy, Robert M. Place, Ron Regé, Jr., J.L. Schnabel, Hunter Stabler, Panos Tsagaris.

Alchemically Yours opens on Saturday, May 7th, 2011, 7–10pm and will run from May 8th to June 12th, 2011.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Laurie Lipton’s Splendor Solis
• The Arms of the Art
• Splendor Solis
• Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae
• A Love Craft: Art Inspired by Monsters, Madness and Mythos
• Cabala, Speculum Artis Et Naturae In Alchymia
• Vision Quest
• Digital alchemy
• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists

Vision Quest

Artwork: Accepting Fear Rather Than Trying to Understand It by Jason Leinwand.

Pam at Phantasmaphile follows last year’s Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists show by curating a new exhibition, Vision Quest, at Observatory, Brooklyn, NYC later this month:

…each piece in VISION QUEST explores the archetype of the shamanic voyage, using the tools of paint, pencil, or paper in lieu of fire, flower, feather. Taken together this work represents a full spectrum of what it means to go underground and out of body; to go there and come back again, perhaps just a little bit wiser or, at the very least, more wide awake.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Jesse Bransford • William Crump • Scott Gursky • Juliet Jacobsen • Ashley Lande • Adela Leibowitz • Jason Leinwand • Christopher Mir • Joe Newton • Herbert Pfostl • Christopher Reiger • Christine Shields • Erika Somogyi • Jessie Rose Vala

More details at Phantasmaphile. Meanwhile, a reminder that the similarly-themed Strange Attractor Salon opens this week at Viktor Wynd Fine Art, London. It’s looking like I’ll be too busy to attend the opening as the world crawls back to work after the holiday season but many of the other featured artists should be there on Thursday night if you happen to be in the East End.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Strange Attractor Salon
• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists

Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot

left: The Magus from the Thoth Tarot by Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley (1938–1940?); right: The Magus from The Major Arcana by John Coulthart (2006).

Phantasmaphile presents another magickal art event in NYC next week. Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot is described as “a personal narrative by Jesse Bransford”, an artist with a very distinctive approach to traditional occult symbolism. Bransford’s talk will focus on the peerless Thoth Tarot deck which Frieda Harris painted over several years under the careful direction of Aleister Crowley. The Thoth deck for me is still the ultimate Tarot deck. Crowley and Harris sought to create a Tarot for the 20th century, throwing out much of its tired and degraded iconography. This they replaced with dramatic interpretations which brought new layers of symbolism to the cards—including references to contemporary science—and also acknowledged the developments of Cubism and Futurism in the visual sphere. Tarot decks have proliferated since the 1960s but the Thoth deck has few (if any) rivals. I made use of Crowley’s controversial reordering and renaming of the cards in 2006 when I produced my set of Major Arcana designs based on international symbol signs.

The Tarot in general and Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot in particular represent a miasmic confluence of image and thought into a single structure that is both liberating and overwhelming in its scope. In creating the deck, Crowley (in collaboration with painter Lady Frieda Harris) sought to integrate the mythological structures of the major mystical systems of both Western and Eastern occult traditions and to bring them into line with contemporary scientific thinking. The symbolism of the cards blends Kabbalah, Alchemy, Astrology, Egyptian mythology, quantum physics and even the I-Ching in ways that are at the same time clear and utterly confounding.

In an image-soaked personal narration Bransford, whose research-based artwork has delved into many of the territories Crowley sought to unify, will discuss some of the basic concepts of Tarot symbolism, returning to Crowley’s deck as among the most total example of the cards’ syncretism and as the most controversial.

Layered Orders: Crowley’s Thoth Deck and the Tarot takes place at Observatory, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn, NYC on Friday, July 17 at 7:30pm. Admission is free and there are further details at the Observatory website and Phantasmaphile.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fata Morgana: The New Female Fantasists
• Aleister Crowley on vinyl
• The Man We Want to Hang by Kenneth Anger
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995