The Mystical Tradition: Drawings of Memory and Mystery at the Drawing Center

The Mythic Image also focuses on an elaborate and charming exchange between artist Janet Malcolm and author Marta Werner. Malcolm mediates her observations of Emily Dickenson in her “Open Folios,” with mental images from observation of the stars to language, and history. Werner presents transcriptions of Dickinson’s handwritten prose, which was discovered after the poet’s death. These works highlight the artists’ uncanny imagination and figurative language and read like a mystery novel. Also on view are works by Mohammed O. Khalil, Arnold J. Kemp, and Steffani Jemison, who all deal with the chasm of the unknown or the abyss, and the ways in which light and dark belong not only to ancient and mystical traditions but also psychoanalysis.

In the catalogue for the show, Lauren O’Neill-Butler wrote an essay on the mystical tradition and the exhibition's theme discusses the limitations of mortal language. She elaborates on historicity, the collective and the individual, and memory and tradition.

This exhibit proposes artwork that goes beyond today’s identity politics. It’s so refreshing because there is no artful figuration present. I spoke to curator Olivia Shao about her inspiration for the exhibition, and our conversation is below.

A&O: Could you explain the background of the exhibition?

Olivia Shao (OS): “Of Mythic Worlds” is intended to slow things down in our fast-paced world, and encourage the viewer to spend time looking and contemplating each work. The exhibition explores several themes of myth, ritual, cosmologies, and belief systems, and hopes to explore similarities in many perspectives and practices, rather than differences across cultures and histories, with the intention to be open-ended and have a multitude of meanings.

A&O: You begin the catalogue for the show with the early works of Mel Chin from the 1980s and 90s.  Was he the catalyst for the exhibition?

OS: I have admired Mel Chin’s work for many years. I was looking at his earlier drawings from the 1980s, alongside other works by several artists as I was starting the research for the exhibition. 

A&O: How did you discover the work of Cameron? Her drawings are alive and literally afire with energy. It’s as if there is some unknown force working through the paper that can only be grasped within its unfolding. 
OS: I first encountered Cameron’s works in 2007, at a beautiful exhibition at Nicole Klagsburn’s gallery. I was drawn to the intensity of Cameron's work and interested in her history and background, as she is a poet, writer, actor, and practitioner of the occult.  

A&O: You have selected a beautiful drawing by Lee Bontecou of an eye’s internal, depth, mythical quality, a dark hole for a mythical traveler, and a void time that is open-ended. It draws you in and takes you wherever you wish to go. Can you tell me more about Bontecou’s evolutionary path?

OS:- I like your thoughts on Bontecou’s drawing in the exhibition. Dark and light are a theme across several cultures. This idea of duality can also be seen in Daoist thought, where both dark and light are part of the same and each consists of the other. 

A&O: Walter de Maria, a sculptor of thoughts in this post-pandemic drawing, operates on different levels. Is this work of his an anomaly?

OS: Throughout Walter De Maria’s career, he has always maintained a drawing practice. His drawings depicted subjects such as mountains, cats, and castles, with the restraint of a few lines or the faintest mark. These works convey a profound depth and discipline, a controlled energy transferred from the artist’s hand to a line on paper. This energy can also be seen throughout his land works and sculpture.

A&O: I agree. There’s also a real need for us to look more at Jordan Belson now. We seem to be experiencing a zeitgeist moment looking for spiritual grounding and archetypal experiences. Belson’s drawings look inward while manifesting “otherworldliness” where lines decode synapse connections and communicate neural systems of the brain and universal invisible structures. I’m also thinking about Roland Barthes here. Once he stopped writing, Barthes made wonderful drawings for his mother. How long did he continue to draw? Is there a back story to this?

OS: Barthes made over 500 drawings (Contre- écriture) in gouache, pen, crayon, and pastels throughout the 1970s, many for his lover Romaric Sulger-Buel. In Peter Schwenger’s Asemic: The Art of Writing, he argued that the drawings could be a way of overcoming the problem expressed in Barthes’s book A Lover’s Discourse: “Love has, of course, a complicity with my language (which maintains it) but it cannot be lodged in my writing.” And so, it is conveyed in these asemic notes that say nothing and everything. Barthes writes about these drawings in his essay Coloring, Degree Zero, and in a special issue of Luna-Park titled “Graphies.”