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Americanaesoterica

Jason Metcalf / Jennifer West / Max Hooper Schneider / Mike Bouchet / Sterling Ruby

11 September 2015 – 31 October 2015

Press release (English) Press release (Bulgarian) Artists' biographies (English) Artists' biographies (Bulgarian) AMERICANAESOTERICA Catalogue

Curator: Aaron Moulton

Opening in the presence of the curator and artists.
on 11 September at 'Night Plovdiv' 2015

AMERICANAESOTERICA is a presentation of artists whose practices employ aspects of ritual, superstition, alchemy and magic. Produced on the occasion of 'Night Plovdiv' 2015, the exhibition takes place both within the white cube of Sariev Contemporary with elements
dispersing throughout the city of Plovdiv.

AMERICANAESOTERICA Trailer
Video: Aaron Moulton - The Paranoid Prophet
Video: Jason Metcalf - The Witch Doctor
Video: Jennifer West - The Alchemist

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AMERICANAESOTERICA

During the years in which the United States had NO esoterica to speak of, prophet after prophet spoke at length concerning the kind of esoterica which the new republic was to have. There was a reasonable diversity of expectation among them, but almost all of them agreed that Americana Esoterica, whatever it might be, was bound to be strong in its character.
--Carl van Doren, Americana Esoterica, 1927

And it came to pass, that in a land of occult opulence, an ADD of moral panic was sweeping aimlessly in search of the perfect average. Stemming from a TOXIC CLIMAX of total self-awareness, it was said that the Multiversal indeterminacy of the cultural paradigm, a clear charlatanical structuralism, was creating a corrosive anxiety resulting in acts of anomie amongst citizens of the republic. Exceptionalism gave way to exceptions. ALGORITHMIC ANSWERS and filter bubbles of cultural security eventually eliminated all chances for risk, accident and mutation leading briskly to the doorstep of Nietzsche’s Last Man.

Signs and symbols ⭃ both anticipated and unexplainable in nature, mysticism and culture revealed a Sea change was coming: the decapitation of a Lion King™, THE COMING Tunguska Event in mid-September, the HOMECOMING OF JADE HELM, the Cascadian reboot, the revelation of Roko’s Basilisk, and the discovery of the NWO headquarters on the remote Bouvet Island. Rising like the Phoenixfrom the rubble of spirituality’s last known place of rebirth, a Latter-Day coven of fringe pseudo-SCIentists, known as “contemporary artists”, were authenticating a blend of folk conceptualism and alchemical capitalism -- a compound that forms a new branch of mysticism known as “ESOTERICA”.

Through the generous support of sage aesthetes and cognoscenti, this pentarchy of ARTists embark on a pilgrimage to Plovdiv, deep within the heart of Bulgaria, the black sheep of the Balkans; a land of intrigue, turbo-folk and forgotten sects of a superstitious order. Their mission: to displace a spiritual awakening and offer an act of cultural bridge-building: to introduce AMERICANAESOTERICA in hopes of hexing and warding off the rapidly oncoming leading edge of nuclear mediocrity.

After discovering the formula for what came to be known as “Gravity’s Rainbow”, Sterling Ruby, a shaman of entropy, has labored to define the aesthetics of the Anthropocene. He gives forms to behaviors both lurid and unchecked, often treading to locations that lack CLEAR reference or Source. His film Landscape Annihilates Consciousness channels the acroamatic energies of Murica’s painting guru Bob Ross to form a mantra of spellbinding PROportions that prophetically reveals a next generation of spiritual great awakening.

Enter Mike Bouchet, a mystic merchant who has a long-standing relationship with capitalistic oligarchy furnishing their corporate whimsy with exaltation of the highest glory. Bouchet has courted HIS Royal Eminence, Burger King™, to develop a tinctured essence of deep-fried, char-broiled, Have it Your Way drive-thru instaculture divined according to the SACRED AND TRUE ORDER of proportions and Whopper™-ized golden ratios distending at the rate of the cosmic microwave background. The all-you-can-smell scent reigns in the salt-and-peppery notes like a Cassandra.

Max Hooper Schneider, supposedly at one time a fledgling scientist, was found in a back alley of a TRANSsexual strip club strung out on iridium wafers and UV gel. For years prior and leading up to this point he had painstakingly mulched copies of Descartes in his Cuisinart™ for purposes of understanding its QUANTUM VIBRATIONS. In a choreographed instant HE had been savaged and left for dead. The Kevlar™ kimono had been removed. His collapsed Body signaled toward a nearby wall where traces of indecipherable markings and frenzied pleas hummed with a grime-green glow. This wall now serves as photoluminescent prompt for future cryptographic scrawls -- an architecture of nocturnal emission, we read it as it reads us.

The witch doctor Jason Metcalf harnesses the potentiality of the sympathetic hex in his archive of fixed Tokens and talismans. These sculptural superste-tions physicalize folkloric prescriptions and challenge double negatives with false positives on a whelmingly SUBLIMINAL scale. Each relic is a steganography of Symbols that transposes ciphers both actual and envisioned. His pseudo-ostensive taxonomy forges Deseret shibboleths, lucky charms and reflective evileyes that embrace and consume Outer Darkness. Each Terrestrial brushstroke in his painting “Salamander” is sutratmatically bound to the Astral Plane, holistically forming a Stargate to the Devachanic Oliblish for the initiated.

Alchemist Jen West’s sentient celluloids project her film’s experiences like a scrying device of psychic materiality. Through the spectral lens of cameraless cinema, image registry and chemical distortions SINfully marry to form a hallucinogenic clairvoyance of PURE contagious magic. While her process is melioristic and deliberate, the consequences are decidedly ethereal, shredding the metaphysical pipeline that feeds into an El Niño of raw experience.

The preceding writ was presented by NUMEROUS beings of the Celestial order appointed to the task of providing an epochal spiritual revelation, the ushering in of the Seventh Seal. It autonomously organized over several sessions using a quorum of mediums in contact with SUPREME BEings. The writing COMES TO US NOW out of necessity and interplanetary communion. Inquiries regarding the apparition of AMERICANAESOTERICA in Plovdiv or elsewhere should be directed to Aaron Moulton, cultural agent to the phenomenon.

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HAIL ROKO
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The exhibition is kindly supported by the U.S. Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria. Additional support was generously provided by Alex Marshall, Mihail Lari and Scott Murray, James Lindon, Peres Projects, Diliana and Spas Roussev, Sam and Diane Stewart, Cynthia Schwartz and Robyn Siegel, Linda and Kriegh Moulton, Mette and Asger Moulton.

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