A Trip Guide

in the summer heat, minds slip easily into bodies ≈ bending towards sensation, speculation and radical affinities

\\ Ryan Peter’s Untitled might become a black cat that once visited W.S. Burroughs, “a creature of the lightless depths [or vast heights] where life as we on the surface know it cannot exist, [who] brought light and color with him as color pours from tar.”¹ Its seven digits, melting grey and pale pink, lock eyes with us, pulling us forward and inward.

// We step through to the other side of this creature’s hypnotic manicure into the scattered matter of Steve Lyons’ Speculative Collaborations. Using both historical research methods and an associative, paranoid, and flawed logic, Lyons imagines a hypnosis pavilion produced by clinical neurophysiologists in consultation with the creative fields under the auspices of the CIA’s Project MK-Ultra. The project envisions an ‘unsettling’ alliance between some of the most prominent anti-establishment voices of the 1960s-80s (consider: Burroughs, Ginsberg, Buren, Conrad, Graham, Gysin, Kesey, Marker, Sharits, and Sommerville) and the state institutions they publicly disavowed. Case in point: the (im)probable mashup in the symbiotic S.C. 01 (v. 1) and S.C. 03 (v. 1) where a CCTV camera live streams the movement of Buren-like stripes as they spin on a Gysin-like Dream Machine to create a Conrad-like flicker film. Information leaks electric.

// A variety of Peter’s psychedelic bipeds and a photogram of a hand that reaches towards, to then become, a branch tell us we are on path. The jagged sides of digitally rendered triangles in Patrick Howlett’s enigmatic poster confirm: the higher you get the higher you get—a mountain climbing mantra.

|| Upstairs, Maryse Larivière and Mackenzie Ludlow’s hypercolour garden, An Attempt To Live Outside Time By Living In A Part of Time, An Attempt To Live Timelessly In The Past And In The Future, perches on the fourth dimension, scantily recolonized by two Venetian lovebirds. Its previous residents have checked in, dropped out, and floated away. The hands on the clock rest at ten and two.

\\ Left behind, two works from Sandra Meigs’ The Morphine Drawings depict thought-forms from the threshold of consciousness. One, in loopy script, declares, “look at yourself.” The other—a face—walks across light’s spectrum from red to violet, bearing witness.

[1] William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands, New York: Viking, 1987, p. 247.

image: Ryan Peter, Untitled, 2010