Psychedelia is a state of mind. It is a particular mode of perception that upends our assumptions about the way that the world works. It is about heightened color, glimmering patterns, and swirling constellations of form that challenge gravity and the very boundaries between discrete objects.

Al Held, Eagle Rock III, 2000

The exhibition Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960’s at the San Antonio Museum of Art takes these ideas as a net to gather a wide range of artists. The 1960’s, as the well-worn story of post war America goes, was a moment of civil unrest driven by a youth culture that was suspect of authority and newly intoxicated by sex, drugs and rock and roll. It also was a time when artists were riffing on the newly invented methods of image making that Surrealism and hard edged abstraction introduced. As a result, artists such as Richard Anuszkiewicz and other Op Art innovators explored pattern and abstraction to create hallucinatory visual paintings.

Philip Taaffe’s Trinity (1985) extends these ideas from Op Art, creating an image with silkscreen and collage that makes one’s eyes buzz. The image makes us feel like we are falling into it and at the same time repelled by its churning space. Taaffe uses a color spectrum and concentric arrows of modulating scale to create a sense of movement that picks us up off our feet and drives us through the picture plane.

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1987

Jack Goldstein - an artist who emerged in the 1980’s, disappeared from the art world in the 1990’s and then surfaced again to public acclaim in 2000 until his suicide in 2003– made images that used filmic and photographic sources for his paintings. Included in the exhibition is Untitled (1987), which uses a photograph of a spectacular moment in natural phenomena. Taken in space, the source image for this painting could be abstract but either way, the radiating degrees of hot pink that emanate from an electric blue ground construct a visual field that is arresting.

Fred Tomaselli, Ripple Trees, 1994

Another part of psychedelia that the exhibition’s curator David S Rubin seeks to distance himself from is drugs. But the exhibition does include Fred Tomaselli’s Ripple Trees (1994) combining pills and hemp leaves with paint and resin to construct an image of a landscape at dusk. This magical time of day – when trees and mountains are reduced to mere shadows against the soft glowing light on the horizon – is heightened by a web of luminous orbs that radiate pixilated color.

Jeremy Blake, Reading Ossie Clark, 2003

Shifting away from two dimensions, Jeremy Blake’s Reading Ossie Clark (2003) uses montage to combine short, barely legible clips of shot footage with highly saturated digital color. Each clip morphs into the next creating a dreamlike state of ecstasy. Using sculptural installation and an actual light show, Richie Budd’s Bon Voyage Somnabulating De Pileon (2010) builds on the psychedelic impulse to overwhelm the senses with a fog machine and an array of household items and gadgets. It also includes a sound piece that incorporates Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a communication model applied in psychotherapy that studies the structure of subjective experience.

Richi Budd, Bon Voyage Somnambulating De Pileon, 2007

Taken together, an exhibition about psychedelic experience in art is in many ways the most extreme exploration of radical forms of perception – something which is at the core of what Marcel Duchamp called “retinal art.” The best work in this show transcends the quaint utopianism of 1960’s psychedelics, choosing to change the way we see instead of changing the whole world.

Opening tonight in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station, Luis de Jesus Gallery is presenting new paintings by Karen Ann Myers in an exhibition titled Thinking Of You. In a series of mid-sized fleshy paintings of hyper sexualized young women, the work seamlessly combines heavy flat patterns with figuration. Patterns slide in and out of abstraction, only grounded by the figures in the image. Based in self portraiture and personal narrative, Myers work both questions and confirms the objectification and idolization of youth and sexuality in American culture. The fleshy flatness of pattern and color reflect the soft, subtle handling of the figures, and when the figures are absent, the color and line mimic the curves of the forms.

Along with the paintings, Myers is presenting several new screen-printed patterns that integrate decorative form with image. Hidden within the maze of pattern, one will find reductive Kama Sutra poses embedded in the sea of color and line.

Myers’ paintings and prints have been exhibited at the Robert Steele Gallery in New York, the Commonwealth Gallery in Boston, the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC and Scoop Contemporary in Charleston, SC. Her exhibition at Luis de Jesus will be on view until August 7th, 2010. In 2009, DailyServing did a visit with the artist in her studio to discuss the work in relation to her experiences in love and eroticism, her childhood memories, and herself as a young woman in a contemporary culture that places high value on glamor and sex appeal.

Thinking Of You will be on view through August 7th, 2010.

Opening Thursday, May 6th, We have as much time as it takes is the final thesis exhibition of the Curatorial Practice program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. The following interview was conducted for the exhibition catalog between curators Nicole Cromartie and Courtney Dailey and two members of Red76. It is the first in a series of interviews to be published at Daily Serving with artists from the exhibition. The catalog is available as a free downloadable pdf at www.wattis.org/whamtait.

Red76 is a multi-artist collective founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2000. The project they conceived for We have as much time as it takes was executed mainly by two of its members, Sam Gould and Gabriel Saloman. Counter-Culture as Pedagogy: Pop-Up Book Academy is a yearlong series of events that take place in a variety of venues. The latest edition of The Journal of Radical Shimming, available for free in the gallery, includes interviews and a counterculture index created for this exhibition. It will accompany the project’s next iteration at the Walker Art Center this summer. Learn more at www.red76.com.

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Universe Revolves ON (XVIII), Hema Upadhyay, Edition of 12, Etching, aquatint, open-bite and screenprint on machine made fabriano 100% cotton paper 71 x 92 (28" x 36¼”) © Hema Upadhyay/Singapore Tyler Print Institute

Hema Upadhyay creates works based primarily on photography and painting, and she resumed her foray in printmaking as a means of experimentation, after a decade’s hiatus. Her art practice revolves around issues of identity, dislocation, nostalgia and gender, often drawn from her family history of migration and her personal experience with the socio-economic inequalities present in Asia. The visceral impacts of these socio-political issues on the human condition are frequently represented through miniature and collaged bodies. In Universe Revolves ON (XVIII), cut-outs of flailing and falling bodies disrupt the intricate etchings of botanical tree forms shrouded in delicate silk-screened patterns, drawing attention to the attendant psychological and social upheaval and theme of human displacement arising from the rapid urbanization in Mumbai. Upadhyay completed her BFA (Painting) in 1995 and MFA in 1997 from the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda, and is now based in Mumbai.

Break the Ice, Qiu Zhijie, Edition of 12, Etching and relief print, STPI handmade paper 107 x 81 (42¼" x 32”) © Qiu Zhijie/Singapore Tyler Print Institute

Qiu Zhijie is a Chinese contemporary artist and works with a diverse range of media including photography, video, calligraphy, painting, installation and performance, and combines writing and curatorial practice with his artistic explorations. In 2006, Qiu started the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge Project. Imbued with historical and national significance, as a symbol of modernity and resilience in China, Qiu excavates the meanings associated with the site by investigating the over 2,000 suicides occurring at the bridge since its completion in 1968. Break the Ice is emblematic of Qiu’s combination of traditional Chinese ink painting and Western-based lithography techniques, and the work reflects on the consequences of mammoth, industrial structures on a nation’s history and individuals’ personal lives. Qiu was born in Fujian, China and now lives and works in Beijing. He graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in printmaking.

The works of Upadhyay and Qiu are on view at All Editions: A STPI Survey Show (16 January – 20 February 2010) at Singapore Tyler Print Institute. The exhibition also features works by Ghada Amer/Reza Farkhondeh, Ashley Bickerton and Lin Tianmiao, from their residencies at the institute.

Off Book is the title of a current exhibition by acclaimed New York based conceptual artist Glenn Ligon. The exhibition, which is on view through January 23rd at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects, continues the artist’s investigation of cultural identity, social and historical constructs, language, race, and gender. Similar to previous exhibitions by the artist, Off Book explores these ideas through text-based work, installation, and video. This new series of works investigate many themes discussed in James Baldwin’s essay entitled Figure, originally published in 1953. For this series, the artist has silk screened versions of existing text-based paintings onto colored backgrounds, and then dusted the surface with coal particles. The result is a semi-abstracted surface where the test is obscured through the application of the screen print.  Also on view is a 16 mm black and white film titled, The Death of Tom, and a neon piece, which features the word AMERICA backwards, titled Rügenfigur.

Ligon’s work has been the focus of several major international exhibitions. The artist’s work was selected by the Obama’s to be on loan at the White House. This inclusion made Ligon the youngest artist ever to receive this honor. Recent solo exhibitions for the artist include, ‘Nobody’ and Other Songs at Thomas Dane Gallery in London and Figure/Paysage/Marine at Yvon Lambert in Paris and Love and Theft at Power House in Memphis. The artist is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Rhode Island School of Art and Design. Ligon lives and works in New York City.

The Lever House, at 390 Park Avenue in New York City, recently commissioned artist Richard Woods to create a site-specific installation for the lobby of the Modernist structure. The installation, titled Port Sunlight, features colorful patterns that cover over forty columns, eight benches, and several areas of floor within the lobby. Each of the nine patterns utilized in the installation are created from a series of print blocks which are configured in a pattern of multiples.

For the commission, Woods explored the history of the Lever Brothers company and discovered that they founded a village near Cheshire, England, in the 1800’s  to accommodate the company’s rapid expansion. That village was named Port Sunlight. The artist grew up not far from the area, and is familiar with the Lever’s massive collection of British Victorian art, which was on public display at the Lady Lever Gallery in the village.

The patterns used by Richard Woods references the graphic nature of the Victorian decoration collected by the Levers. These patterns attempt to take over and colonize the otherwise modernist lobby, allowing for a playful opposition to develop between the two aesthetics.

Port Sunlight will be on view through January 31st, 2010.

Courtesy: Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo/ The Quiet in the Land, Laos/ the Artist

The Mizuma Art Gallery of Tokyo is showcasing artist Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s ongoing project Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 at Art Positions in Art Basel Miami Beach 2009.  This complex and meaningful project is a statement on the current condition of the refugee and, in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s words, a ‘reflection and offering to the refugees whose lives are to run or to perish’.  As an artist with resources and a passport, Nguyen-Hatsushiba is part of the global elite, whose mobility effortlessly enables movement across national borders.  Through his step and sustained mental and physical discipline the artist physically embodies the desire and struggle of the powerless refugee that is on the move and longs, as the artist notes, ‘to be on “the other side” instead.’

The work is defined not only by Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s act of running, but by the deliberately plotted path the artist takes which crosses any national and ethnic divisions.  In his effort to run 12,756.3 miles – equivalent to the most direct circumference of the earth – Nguyen-Hatsushiba chooses urban areas with a history of forced displacement.  The artist has completed runs in places such as Geneva, Tokyo, Singapore, Manchester and Ho Chi Minh City.  The paths taken in each of these places forms a  shape – often organic – with metaphorical meaning.

Courtesy: Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo/ The Quiet in the Land, Laos/ the Artist.

On view in the Mizuma Art Gallery booth at Art Basel Miami Beach is video footage from a selection of Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s runs paired with ‘earth drawings’ or ‘running drawings’ which map his route from an aerial perspective.  These ‘drawings’ are actually lambda prints created by transposing GPS data of his movements onto aerial photographs of each of the cities chosen for the project.  These GPS transfer prints reveal the symbolic shapes formed by the path of his runs.

Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s film The Ground, the Root, and the Air:  The Passing of the Bodhi Tree from 2004-2007 (single channel video, 14 min, 30 sec) is also on view.  This video explores globalization and resulting loss of tradition in Luang Prabang, Laos.  The image of the runner, an empty stadium, the lantern, the Mekong River and the Bodhi tree serve as symbols of this economic change – as well as hope for the future.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba has shown internationally and can be found in important collections such as the Centre Pompidou and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  He received his BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.  Nguyen-Hatsushiba currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City.  His current project for Breathing is Free: 12,756.3 is set in Chicago.

Art Basel Miami Beach ends 6 December 2009.