SPACE-STATES AND OTHER REALMS
July 7th to 18th, 2023
Reception for exhibition and PhilaDelic conference, July 13th from 6-8 pm
This exhibition coincides with the PhilaDelic Conference hosted by the Penn Psychedelic
Collaborative. Co-curated by Rain Gideon and Jackie Tileston, it gathers together works
that are in alignment with the notion of mind-expanding explorations. Artists included in
this exhibition are Kate Abercrombie, Min Baek, Arden Bendler Browning, Joy Feasley,
Sarah Gamble, Rain Gideon, Raimonds Jermaks, Yae-rin Kweon, Kirk McCarthy, Hunter
Stabler, Kate Stewart, Paul Swenbeck, Catching on Thieves, Jackie Tileston, and Nathan
Thomas Wilson.
“Space-States and Other Realms”
For millennia, mystics, psychonauts, and artists have attempted to express their direct
experiences with non-ordinary states of consciousness and other dimensions. The
imaginal, entheogenic, and speculative interact and catalyze each other in so many
dynamic and mesmerizing ways, and this group of artists is actively engaged in
translating these realms into form.
While the expected image bank for “psychedelic” art often registers as an illustration or
postcard of the trip report, a sort of Fantastic Realism, we are deliberately opening the
vocabulary to offer work that expands our consciousness by using the aesthetic
experience to allow us access to these other realms and states of being. Conceptual
and visual experiments generate new possibilities for the viewer, and paradigms
become deliciously slippery under our feet. Gnosis happens in all kinds of ways.
In 1956 the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term psychedelic, deriving it
from the Greek psyche – soul, mind, and deloun – to manifest, to open. This could
relate to all artistic efforts to depict the inner world, not just those precipitated by
ingesting a mind-altering substance. At its best, art is a psychoactive phenomenon
that inherently alters consciousness.
In his book, Are you Experienced: How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern
Art, critic Ken Johnson talks about “how consciousness abstracts and organizes
sensory input.” According to his theory, psychedelics “activate exactly the functions of
consciousness that we rely on to produce art and to represent experience, memory,
and fantasy in formally intelligible and illuminating ways.”
The artists included in Space-States and Other Realms use architecture, abstraction,
patterning, and symbols of mythical and theoretical origins to construct images of
subtle invisible phenomena, theoretical shapes of the universe, mystical creatures, and
microcosmic vibratory events. Humor, imagination, and speculation pulsate beneath the
works. As immersion into non-ordinary experiences transform knowledge, we can ask
how future generations will embody their direct experiences of expanded realities.
-Jackie Tileston
Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery
200 S. 36th St
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Gallery Hours: M-F 10 am to 5 pm