Prism of Threads : June 2013

Today is the book launch of The Archaic Revival Review at Print Room in Rotterdam. Tomorrow June 7th, is the opening reception of The Archaic Revival group exhibition at Zic Zerp gallery curated by Dani Tull. This series features mostly works on paper by 35 artists from Los Angeles, Portland, and Rotterdam. It's been an amazing experience to be a part of this series since 2009.

The term Archaic Revival is a reference to Terence Mckenna's 1992 book The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History, which hypothesizes that civilization's current state of distress has resulted in a grappling into our collective memory and the "morphic resonance" of our past 3.5 million years for steading metaphors that reconnect us to the entelechy of the planet: the Gaian mind. Terence Mckenna (1946–2000) was an American writer, philosopher, ethnobotanist, mystic and prophet who advocated paths of shamanism and the use of plant-based psychedelics as a means of increasing many forms of human awareness.

The Archaic Revival incorporates a wide array of cultural models and technologies such as shamanism, pantheism, pagan ritual, alchemy and magic as well as the 20th century avant-garde art movements of jazz, surrealism, and cubism (with its glorification of the primitive, modern anthropology). More recently, the expanding power of the internet and new media technologies have also become powerful tools that infuse and ignite ancient and contemporary understandings of tribal connectivity, inspiring a sense of global coherence, along with a brewing notion of a new cyber-mystical domain of "infomysticism" and "techgnosis". Furthermore, indigenous ceremonial medicines once misused as "psychedelic drugs" have become re-contextualized in Western culture as sacramental "entheogens", while tribal festivals, ecstatic dance, and a flourishing awareness of critical environmental issues and sustainable living have reawakened our traditional attitudes toward nature. Perhaps most interestingly, Mckenna's Archaic Revival signifies the eventual breakdown of the pattern of male dominance and hierarchy based on "animal organization," and takes us back to the ideal of a vegetational "Earth Goddess."

Fetal Attraction, the piece I made for this years Archaic Revival exhibition. Below is a sneak peek of my alien fetal stroke mushroom page in The Archaic Revival Review book.