Exhibition dates: October 7th– 30th
Opening Reception: First Friday, October 7th 6pm – 10pm
Open weekends 2pm – 6pm or by appointment: 215.840.7239
Klecksomancy is divination summoned through the use of inkblots. A suite of 13 cards created for the purpose of divination will be used during the opening reception to offer guidance and insight towards the intentions of viewers who choose to participate.
This invention of a divination method, and the exploration of divining is a way to celebrate and affirm creative individual and collective autonomy in an age all too often defined by isolation, inequality, and feelings of powerlessness. Interacting with undefined sacred energies through the medium of Klecksomancy, meditating upon the pregnant form of the void represented by the inkblots, and engaging in the communal activities of magic are all forms of personal reflection, community building, and mutual growth. The pandemic taught us what we already know, that the current system of late stage global capitalism is broken and that other worlds are possible and attainable. Through solidarity and collaboration we can create speculative possible futures that are solid and thriving from our dreams, projections, and divinations.
This exhibition is built upon playful instantiations, game play, and ambiguity endurance. Notions of trade and barter are integral to the process and reception. Transmutation of materials, chance, and shaping providence are outcomes achieved through disparate connections, embodied mythology, and courageous presentation.
The forms created for Klecksomancy search for meaning that define the Chthulucene, this new epoch we have entered, Post-Pandemic, post-Anthropocene, climate crisis informed, tentacular, multi-optic, and multi-specied. I’m interested in synchronizing with climate change through rewilding, quarantine social contracts, digital instantiation, and how our technologies have worked through our central nervous systems and etched marks in our flesh. I feel we are internalizing rapidly shifting currents of change, social upheavals, and mutating cultural and environmental norms that are moving at velocities that momentarily transcend literal articulation. An understanding of progress through iteration, phase shifting between virtual and visceral, and the transmutation of identities informs my aesthetics and research.
The most succinct palimpsests capturing this age are acts of kindness, pictures and forms that describe movement and migration, gestures that are quick and close to thinking, and space enough to capture new forms from flickering ephemera, and evidence of cultivation of kinship with sentient beings other than humans, particularly trees and rivers, a sentiment echoed in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Games such as Dungeons and Dragons, early commodore 64 video games, and Hive Carbon are seminal in the aesthetic choices I make; the memory of playing these games with friends and family guide my hand, lend a sense of atmosphere, and create systems to follow. The dynamics of graphic novel narratives are also influential to my voice for this body of work. The escalation of these stories from sequential art to moving images to interactive games has opened my eyes to the possibilities of cross-platform meta-narratives. Finally, all these concerns often run through numerous instantiations, mold making, metal casting, to arrive at a power object of hand held talisman proportions. Many of the sculptures are 3D prints, first modeled on a tablet in a tactile and gestural manner, often incorporating 3D scans of people important to me. The digital objects are then 3D printed, molds are created from the forms and cast in wax to ultimately exist as cast bronze, aluminum and iron. These iterations are then 3D scanned and brought into Virtual Reality, where scale is shifted, form is manipulated and the process continues.
