Pineal Eye Infection

Seasons, Los Angeles 2020
Curated by Aaron Moulton

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Script Read Time: 4 minutes

The impulse to transcend... Ever experienced it?
Believe it or not it’s quite natural, often painful and most times disappointing. I want to talk about that here today.
We are mysteries to ourselves.
A synthesizing breath called “Pneuma” inhabits the air around us like a divine aerosol.
It gives these objects here qualities we call aura and energy. Our pineal gland allows us to engage in distinctive yet unexplained cognitive vibrations, absorb knowledge through omens and connect us all in mysterious ways. However, we have all embraced different forms of what I’m going to call...“bureaucracy” to help diffuse the power of that magic, to shift it into a safer space, one that is more acceptable by society, civilization, culture... your parents. These things become dismissed as an unexplainable coincidence, a superstition, an artificial intelligence or a voice in your head. For some extreme cases, it has caused what we call a Pineal Eye Infection.
Through case studies and the building of this vocabulary, we map realities that are trauma-tized by psychedelics, perception or madness. Divine intuition is both a gift and a curse. In rare cases, we have seen symptoms such as extreme vision, total clarity and even a sickness from the pure desire to see in the patients we bring before you in this groundbreaking study. But you have to physically see it to believe it... to feel it.
While an art exhibition doesn’t seem like a place for healing, it is in fact a portal and a place for energy alignment. Imagine it just like an altar and a superstitious ritual. The cumulative power of these energies will have a grand effect.
We believe the aboriginal function of art is as a vehicle for spirituality. We know this from the shaman and his cave paintings up through the transcendental bureaucracy of the church, religion, Socialist realism and now our current age of marketing utopias. These are different ways of helping humans manifest and discipline their transcendental aspirations and manage perceptions of energy systems, and avant-garde impulses. Is it possible that art is a misnam-ing? Because I will tell you something, the media is not just what is revealed but it’s also what is not revealed.
We are these simple energy receptors and producers and there’s ways to imagine that energy can be controlled and purposed. Creative expression, the act of creation, is the release of an energy from a body to create a new form. It is the sorcery of a Duchamp readymade, a per-ception of energy transference, coming directly from the body and held within the material in that new environment.
Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today. We’re thinking about esoteric energy phenomena in a scientific way through the natural creative impulse. Using an anthropology of patterns we reveal mutations and anomalies that embody cultural conditions - structures that inhibit how we communicate: language itself. This study is here to tease out these occult sys-tems, divine intuitions and spiritual cosmologies that we know are there but they’re elusive and we need these prisms to see them through. I’m here to show you where all that energy is coming from and how to set it free.

Participating artists:

Tekla Aleksieva, Theodora Allen, Sara Kathryn Arledge, ASTRALORACLES + L, Michael Atal- lah, Alison Blickle, Aaron Russell Brown, Brian Butler, Marjorie Cameron, Michael Carter, Carlos Castaneda, Joshua Citarella, John Duncan, Lara Joy Evans, Bob Flanagan, Alex Grey, Rick Griffin, Mi Kafchin, Thomas Kinkade, Kris Lemsalu, Maison Anonyme/Hallucinex, Grace McGrade, Simphiwe Ndzube, Olga Nesvetaylov, PascALEjandro, Jorge Peris, Jon Pylypchuk, Alexander Reben, Justin Rightsell, Sky Rivers, Anja Salonen, Jeremy Shaw, Luigi Serafini, Peter Shire, Anatoly Shuralev, Penny Slinger, Daniel Small, Harry Smith, Cevin Soling, Ingo Swann, Moffat Takadiwa, Michael Thibault, Shawn Thornton, Panos Tsagaris, Jeffrey Vallance.

"Within that moment, all worlds converged"
gold leaf, acrylic, spray paint and silkscreen on canvas
80"x60" (200x150 cm)
2019

Installation view “Pineal Eye Infection”, Seasons, Los Angeles 2020.

Installation view “Pineal Eye Infection”, Seasons, Los Angeles 2020.