Closing Family Workshop with Rebecca Niederlander!

building, Building, building blocks, Blocks, blocks: an afternoon of intergenerational wood fun

3:30 PM - 5 PM
Nan Rae Gallery at Woodbury University
7500 N Glenoaks Blvd, Burbank, California 91510

Join Rebecca Niederlander in a afternoon of making abstract sculptures from wood! The building blocks of Rebecca's installation for the practice, Practice, practice exhibition are the scraps she retrieves from woodworkers all over town. Come and develop your own expandable sculpture. Everything provided. Free for all, all ages encouraged.

This workshop coincides with the last day to see "practice, Practice, practice: Abstract Spirituality in Los Angeles Painting, Sculpture and Performance" curated by Doug Harvey. Please join us as we celebrate the exhibition.

June Edmonds: Circle/Curve Series

The geometric patterns and forms described in the post on entoptic phenomena below are a fundamental feature of many Abstract Spiritual visual art vocabularies, including several artists included in practice, Practice, practice. These are variously (though not exclusively) characterized as sentient entities in a virtual painting reality, as visions of the underlying structure of consciousness, or as portals between the mundane and sacred realms.

June Edmonds' vibrant, confidently impastoed  circles of radiant color are like controlled bursts of psychic energy, caught at various points in their unfolding, often cropped like a snapshot, offering a momentary, fragmentary glimpse of a much larger system and process. Citing the remarkable and rich ideographic Adinkra symbol-system of the Ashanti, Edmonds' description of her work as "a doorway to memory" also reinforces its visual similarity to the dot-paintings of the indigenous Australians -- the longest continuous visual art tradition operating in the world today (and, in case I need to point it out, an Abstract Spiritual Painting tradition).

Edmonds' circles and curves also bear a delightful social interpretation, as multiple "doorways" brush against one another, intersecting or overlapping -- multiple simultaneous autonomous but interdependent denizens of Flatland jostling and negotiating to find balance. It's called "composition," people!

 

  June Edmonds: The Circle/Curve Series

   Inspired by my meditation practice, The Circle/Curve Series began as a way to explore how col-
   or, repetition, and balance could serve as conduits to spiritual contemplation and interpersonal
   connection.

   I am drawn to the use of the circle because of its rich array of cultural and historical
   associations. The West African Adinkra use concentric circles to symbolize what is said to be
   the symbol of “the greatest power”. In my work I use the circle as a doorway to memory, to
   identity and to connection to the highest and most mysterious parts of the inner self. Themes of
   personhood and the complexity of relationship are also addressed in these works.

   I’m interested in the ways counting, keeping time, improvisation, and elements of surprise can be
   represented visually within each work. My goal is to infuse each work with a rhythmic, pulsating,        and alluring energy which invites the viewer to connect with something higher within.

See more of June's work here: http://juneedmonds.com/home.html, and in person at pPp until Sunday the 17th!

Maga - Maga's Prayer - Live @ Nan Rae Gallery

pPperformance Nite Roundup

As predicted, an extraordinary evening of powerful strangeness. Here are some shots of Joana Alaya channelling MAGA, accompanying Khang Bao Nguyen's yoga demonstration on the mouth harp, Mary Ana Pomonis invoking the Sumerian goddess Inanna, and Dani Tull pulling out the stops all the way to 12 on his dueling chord organs. Video to come.

 

pPperformance Nite

If you're in the Los Angeles area and in the mood for a different sort of performance art, swing by the Nan Rae Gallery at Woodbury U in Burbank tonight for an unusual line-up of LA-based performers, in conjunction with "practice, Practice, practice: Abstract Spirituality in Los Angeles Painting, Sculpture and Performance" curated by Doug Harvey.

This evening's unique offerings include Mary Ana Pomonis' blindfolded abstract painting ritual dedicated to the Sumerian Goddess Inanna, a demonstration of advanced yoga asanas by Khang Bao Nguyen accompanied on the mouth organ by Joanna Ayala, who will also debut a new body of solo vocal work channeling a divine feminine archetype called MAGA. The evening will conclude with a drone chord organ improvisation by Dani Tull. It promises to be a memorable evening!

pPperformance Nite

8 - 9:30 PM

April 6th, 2016

Nan Rae Gallery at Woodbury University
7500 N Glenoaks Blvd, Burbank, California 91510

Diamonds, Lambdomas, and Mt. Meru: The Return of Sacred Objects to a Secular Landscape.

Former Angeleno musical spiritual abstractionist Kraig Grady alerted us to the following recent blog posting. The Music of Anaphoria would have fit nicely with tomorrow night's pPperformance Nite.

Wilson's Chart of the Mt. Meru/Lambdoma interface

 

Today, as never before,

we are witnessing an opposition
not between art and life,
but between sacral and secular spaces.
                                                              -Ilya Kabakov

"In the process of my wife, Terumi Narushima working on her book on Erv Wilson's Tuning innovations, the subject of the Partch's Diamond and its origin have come up. What strikes myself is that how this structure seems to have been reawakened in not only Harry’s vision even if through Mayer, but the others to as close relatives. Spontaneously they appear in others such as Novaro (in the same year as Partch, 1927), but also Schlesinger too once one scratches the surface of her subharmonic scales sharing a common tone. That all this rediscoverering would happen within a few brief years after 2000 years is uncanny and could be seen almost as if the structure had a life of its own. In its former context it was used to please the gods or to represent the celestial clockwork or even as a reflection of political structure. This Lambdoma returns, but not in the context of an object to be worshipped, but as a something that nevertheless is once again in communication with our secular world. It is within this contact and communication that Partch deserves credit for placing his work and vision. His rituals do not worship these objects, but nevertheless places them within the conversation throughout his own aesthetic objects..."

Continue reading Archivist/Cultural Liaison's "Diamonds, Lambdomas, and Mt. Meru: The Return of Sacred Objects to a Secular Landscape" at the Field Stations and Outposts of Anaphoria Island blog here: http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/diamonds-lambdomas-and-mt-meru-return.html

Entoptic Phenomena

[In archaeology, the term entoptic phenomena relates to visual experiences derived from within the eye or brain (as opposed to externally, as in normal vision).]

"In the 19th century, European and American opticians, physiologists and philosophers developed a broad interest in entoptic phenomena. To generate and study entoptics, they conducted experiments by stimulating brain and retina, electrically at first, later also with mind-altering substances. Especially in the 1960s and 70s, a number of experiments on subjects were conducted using agents such as THC the active ingredient in marijuana), mescaline, psilocybin and LSD. A worldwide ban on these substances interrupted the drug based research on entoptic phenomena.

In 1988, two South African archaeologists referred to this heritage of the 1960s and 70s when they presented an alternative interpretation of stone age rock art of a certain kind. In a sensational publication, David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson observed that the rock and cave art of the later Paleolithic (about 40,000 to 10,000 BC), the time when man (homo sapiens) developed abstract thinking and art, is characterized by two main themes: vivid depictions of animals on the one hand, geometric figures such as dots, circles, lines, curves etc. on the other.

Ever since the discovery of the European Paleolithic caves, archaeologists have been wondering about the importance and meaning of such geometric representations. Attempts to explain them in terms of totemism or magical rituals were hardly convincing to the research community. Lewis-Williams and Dowson brought forward the original thesis that Paleolithic art is inspired by subjective visual phenomena, seen and depicted by shamans or spiritual men and women during altered states of consciousness..."

Read the rest of "Entoptic artifacts as universal trance phenomena" by Floco Tausin here: http://www.viewzone.com/entoptic.html