Close encounters of the new kind

In writer Elvia Wilk’s essay The world made fresh. Mystical encounter and the new weird divine¹ she discusses the protagonist in novelist Jeff VanderMeer’s book Annihilation (2014):

Annihilation’s narrator is the unnamed biologist. An expert in ‘transitional ecosystems’ – regions where one biosphere meets another – she has trained with her colleagues for months to prepare for their journey into Area X.

Wilk’s full text traces the relationship between historical imprints of female mysticism and finds that there is “a lineage of female knowledge outside of dominant epistemologies of both religion and science”. Exposing the often designated “other” or “alien” ascribed to such encounters and transcriptions of them, she argues for a new form agency in such knowledge. Thus, it is to her no coincidence that all (human) characters in Annihilation are women who share an empathic bond with Area X. Area X, an alien landscape that is officially quarantined in the story, represents a current realm of “unknown unknowns” in which the characters, and by extension – the potentials – of current female mystical modalities reside, according to Wilk.

Wilk summarizes that “The body is a transitional ecosystem; it can’t survive in a vacuum”, and suggests that a “new weird divine” may be emergent that pulls from the origins of traditional female mysticism into something that could serve as “a foundation for non-anthropocentric knowledge”. An example of this might be the recent artistic collaborative/movement Laboria cuboniks, a.k.a., Xenofeminism. Another example is the current exhibition at The Brick in Los Angeles, Life on Earth. Art and ecofeminism.

This group exhibition, consisting of ten of our gallery artists, attempts to address these thought-provoking concepts. From emergent and spliced figural studies, to abstract landscapes within fields of un/becoming, the assembled works of Close encounters of the new kind continues this trajectory.

Participating artists: Lidzie Alvisa, Lole Asikian, Felice Grodin, Ivelisse Jimenez, Clemencia Labin, Caroline Lathan-Stiefel, Alejandra Padilla, Silvia Rivas, Graciela Sacco, Alex Trimino.