My dear friend and collaborator Scott Treleaven (who contributed an excellent essay on a life lived with magick to my anthology Generation Hex) has an upcoming solo exhibition from Oct 31 - Dec 5 at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago. Not to be missed if you live in the area (or don’t)!
From the site:
Kavi Gupta Gallery is pleased to present our third solo exhibition of new work by Canadian, Paris-based artist, Scott Treleaven.
Treleaven’s current exhibit memorializes the beautiful delirium of the 19th-century psychocultural impetus to capture the ephemeral - that which throbs just beneath the scrim of consciousness or skin, via travelogue, spirit photography, or film paraphernalia. Viewers engage with uncanny dioramas of spirit and corpus that unveil the foreignness of landscapes inner and outer. Refusing the smug muscularity of traditional self/other, artist/muse epistemologies, the exhibit creates illumination through obliquity, while agency becomes an illusion of static-free perceptual transparency. Its images reveal the poignant fetishism that converts bone, severed organ, or shard into a saintly relic suggesting a beloved whole that only ever flowers elsewhere; ways in which we all transform the meager specimen into Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs.
Uncovering the secret multivalence of European cities, constructed as much by projections of transients as by phantasmatic legacies of their own cultural histories, Treleaven’s ink and collage drawing of the Palais Royal’s urban gardens are nightscapes that yield tenuous epiphanies, shadow plays of pleasure and/or peril. The Arrangement, a table-top vitrine filled with photos, drawings and handmade books, invokes curiosity cabinets, naturalist’s and traveler’s diaries, embossed photographs, the embalming arc of museum glass. Hinting at Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, its incantations are no less magical than those of The Passenger’s grimoire. Sitting as part of an installation triptych, its aesthetic of fragmentation via collage of stock and personal “footage” reveals the fault lines of memory, projection, and fetishism, mapping ambiguous journeys, occult communion, and liaisons. A rabbit emerges from a top hat floating between watercolour blood red curtains and abattoir-stage, questioning agency as magical acts erupt of their own volition.
The exhibit also features a moving video installation of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge done by Treleaven.