March 29th opening accompanied with musical performance by
THE DEPARTMENT

The first in a series of group shows at the Or exploring tangents associated with Psychic Geography. Stemming from the Situationist Internationale (SI) term psychogeography, Psychic Geography deals with leisure economies, distraction, collaboration, fantasy, and the spiritualization of civilization, all while holding possible utopias at arm’s length. Psychic Geography departs from the SI’s original intent by freeing the geography from a locus. While still remaining locked to spatial relations, it is a cognitive geography, testing the principles of pychogeography within the gallery space.

By using New Wave tropes well past their peak, Jacques Rivette’s film Celine and Julie Go Boating draws on the study of psychology and magic to illustrate the possible journeys of the mind. The three exhibiting artists have been given a cut-up segment of this film as a basis for response.

Psychic Geography as mapping of an immaterial, infinite space – the mind. This is a realm without reference, without horizon, where scale has no meaning. How do we explain terrain? Architecture is a structuring form that delineates exterior from interior. In the film Celine and Julie go Boating the characters discover a conduit that allows them to move through a corporeal architecture into each other’s minds. Generally people use the symbolic (words, facial patterns, pictures) to enable them to express their mental terrain. Unable to display the material landscape, Tony and I have paraphrased its constructions and denotations through symbolic architectures.

– Corin Sworn

View the text …who wants to live in the present? (First Supplement)
by J.A. Gaitán