DEM PASSWORDS

Let me explain by way of a fun historical digression why "hermetic comics" make so much sense and why it's weird that it isn't more practiced. To begin with, take the Cathars. Catharism, or Albigensianism, was a dualist heresy flourishing in Southern France and Northern Italy in the 12th and 13th century. It was "dualist" in that it didn't believe in one ultimate source of the creation- God- but two. There was a spiritual world of good created by a good God and a material world created by a bad one. Our whole time here was a state of fallenness and our material world- our bodies- were forever irredeemable. This included, to the horror of the church fathers, the transubstantiated body of Christ, though this wasn't the only point of difference between Cathars and the papal authority. Cathar contempt for the material world meant that wealth was an ignominious pursuit, gender and status were meaningless accidents, the church's thirst for temporal power was sinful, and even having children was to be avoided altogether, at least for the Cathar holy men, the "perfects." And although their numbers were small, Cathars were a thorn for the ballooning influence of papal authority. There had been ascetic orders before, such as the Benedictines, as well as anticlerical movements criticizing the clergy's behavior in light of church doctrine. But Catharism contradicted the doctrine itself, a doctrine largely settled since the council of Nicea muzzled Gnosticism some thousand years earlier. Worst of all for the Church, Cathars were well-loved within their communities and, both by their virtue and their persecution, made the Church look like a bunch of assholes.

Plus, the timing was bad for Rome. Pope Innocent III was still enjoying the zenith of the "papal monarchy." After several skirmishes with Europe's monarchs, the Pope was effectively the leader of all Christendom. It was a supremacy maintained less by arms or treasure than by the power of belief alone, or what the sociologist Michael Mann describes as "ideological power." Think about how unique this is. The dominant mode of power over Europe was sheer belief. The most heated questions were matters of cosmology and meaning. Knights who went on crusades often bankrupted their families and perished in the attempt, and why? Primarily in order to defend Christianity and to absolve themselves of some pretty unchristian behavior back home. Popes humbled kings with excommunication. All of Europe, from the peasantry up to the royalty, feared for their souls and the orthodoxy was nearly universal... Nearly. Innocent III ordered the Cathars to be converted by the inquisitors or crushed by what's been called the "Albigensian crusade." In most respects, Catharism was soon no more. In other ways though, Cathars spelled the beginning of the end for the Church's hegemony, a medieval rehearsal of the Return of the Jedi. Papal powers were on the wane. After the first, each Crusade spelled greater and greater disaster, with the Islamic powers chewing up more of the East by the year. The Black Death wiped out a third of the continent and made Christendom wonder if, just maybe, they weren't really God's favorite. And clamp down as the Church might, the Renaissance and Reformation quickly eroded the rest of the Church's monopoly on thought.

So the Cathars mark a turning point. For all that, they remain somewhat mysterious. Their works were burned and most of what we know of them comes from the drawers of enemies and inquisitors, meaning that Cathar wisdom is partly a matter of speculation. This is what unleashes Ron's imaginative faculty. Through comics he scries the hermetic- which is far different than the "fantastic" of most comics. We could invent a world or story in which dualist mystics battle a universal hegemon against annihilation- again like the Jedis- or we could, panel by panel, give image to the lost thought and struggles of our own world. One way isn't any better than the other; they complement each other. While the Universal Goddess- the imago of feminine religious power- is officially subordinate to masculine images, Ron points out that she pops up in our stories and works with a surprising self-similarity: as a Wonder Woman, a Statue of Liberty, or as a sculpture on the side of Echo Park lake. "Look for the star over the forehead," he tells me. The hermetic is not hiding to be difficult; it's a survival mechanism. It was suppressed, crushed, forbidden, or burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno in the Campo dei Fiori. But it always left a trail or signal. You just had to know where to look. The hermetic, in the best sense of the term, is always trying to reimagine what was lost and tell a story that was not dictated by the victors, a challenge that has rallied Ron's complete sympathies.

Comics, as a form, also seem more naturally conducive to this- how they're penned, swapped, xeroxed, discovered long-neglected in bins and basements, then read alone under lamplight- especially for someone like Ron who started producing comics while working in a copyshop and moving within New England underground circles. I can't help but think back to Giordano Bruno who, beginning as a young Dominican friar, was kicked out of the monastery when the fathers discovered his bedroom stash of hermetic texts and images. Bruno went on to write numerous works that ecstatically imagine an infinite universe neglected by the Church and what he saw as an oppressive Aristotelianism. And like Bruno, Ron's comics leap from intuition to intuition and depict a wide, unseen, shimmering world. Rather than streets, buildings, and rooms, his backgrounds wiggle, twinkle, and radiate energy. His characters are visible in both body and soul, and often at different stages of a metamorphosis. Rather than being breezy reads, though, you have to sit with each panel for a while, and let it sink in. From the Word of First Thought slows you down even more, parking you between large, bright hermetic icons and supplying you with some Nag Hammadi. Just to hang, and contemplate the power of counterbelief.

-- Text by Brandon Avery Joyce

Ron Rege, Jr., born 1969 in Quincy, Massachusetts, lives and works in Los Angeles. Rege, Jr. holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and has exhibited at galleries and museums including The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; 80 Washington Square East Gallery at NYU, New York; Regina Gouger Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

Rege, Jr. began self publishing and distributing his own comics in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the early 1990's. His first graphic novel "Skibber Bee~Bye" was published by Highwater Books in 2000 and he's since published books with Drawn & Quarterly, McSweeney's, Buenaventura Press and Fantagraphics. Rege, Jr. has produced commercial illustrations for clients including The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Believer Magazine and Nickelodeon and maintains a monthly mini-comic subscription series called "The Shell of the Self of the Senses" available at www.patreon.com/ronregejr .

With Willy's Wife, Daniel wrenches a deeply emotional dramatic narrative out of a soulless set of 3D animation software tools with her creative sensibility and technical expertise perfected over 5 decades. Where goofy Internet oddities made with these same tools fail to provide any significant utility, Daniel's works lay her soul bare and exposes those who lack spiritual understanding or ethics. Daniel revokes man's warrant for inflicting pain, turning the tables on oppressors and suppressors from cheating husbands to pimp bosses. In Willy's Wife, the women are the moral agents though not totally impervious to the same corrupting forces that overtake her male characters. Daniel's characters work through a complex set of pathologies that might best be defined by the Algonquian diagnosis of Wendigo (wetiko) psychosis. This condition is defined by the Algonquian Native Americans as a type of cannibalism that drives beings to insatiably consume one another and their environment to total destruction. The filmmaker humorously plays on her characters' pathological self-involvement to confront habitual corporate, sexual and chemical abuses along with the modern anomie that permit them to go untreated. Willy's Wife doesn't worship death but rather seeks to cultivate life with stories of death. This contemporary animated psychedelic thriller is a homemade remedy for what currently ails us.

Kathleen Daniel, born in 1945, lives and works in Ponitz, Thuringia, Germany. Daniel's dark, figurative imagery, music and animations have been lauded by Dis Magazine, Super Super and Rhizome and written about by Julie Dennis of the San Mateo Weekly. Her work has been shown in the Berlin Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Showcave and Night Gallery in Los Angeles; Secret Project Robot, Ramiken Crucible and New Museum in New York City; It's Liquid International in Venice and across the web. An early adopter of Youtube, Daniel has amassed over 3,500 subscribers to her channel racking up well over 145,000 views, and her voluminous output of music is available for instant download on iTunes, among other platforms.

Kathleen Daniel links --
www.duh-real.com
www.youtube.com/user/silicious
https://katd.bandcamp.com/

The tower dome's woodworked grid-motif is disrupted by little cut-out observation platforms and windows lined with light splitting diffraction grating recalling cathedral glass, with the artwork serving as a sort of parabolic reflector that collects and projects energies while standing as a symbol to the virtues of peace and positive thinking. The low wind load, open-ended design of the hive -- the balancing of negative and positive space -- allows energies to reach the attuned and deliver a consciousness expanding experience to who it will. Barton's heavy lifting is to the heavens despite mostly being a non-believer.

Connected psycho-geographically to the broader constellation of sacred sites in the Ojai Valley, the sculpture sits perched atop the rest of the property next to its own Live Oak like "Baba's Tree" on Meher Mount, and is meant to be considered alongside structures including tree-houses, grain silos and roadside shrines.

Matt Barton, 42, lives and works in Colorado Springs where he is the Co-Director of Visual Art at University of Colorado - Colorado Springs. Barton holds a Master's in Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon and has exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe; and the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh.

Culled from his output over the last 10 months, Aimee Mann presents an expressive calligraphy system that uses variations in spacing between and within letters along with signature embellishments to encrypt McGraw's meditative subjects. Letters, words, phrases and proper names combine into a baroque labyrinth of stems, loops and ligatures which hide a personal journey. The title referring to the eight months McGraw spent scribing the musician's lyrics -- an evolution that followed a year of scribing the calendar date -- Aimee Mann also points to the musical quality of the work; his spacing policy creating resonant waves of text synced with flourishes that connect McGraw's spiritual dimension to the programmatic.

Installed here, the works can read like sentence fragments. "Constant," "Craving," "Shoveling it in." "Excuses", "Blown," "Down the Drain." McGraw's missives feel intimate despite what little we know of the backstories.

The magic of Aimee Mann springs from the tension between the formal constraints of McGraw's system and his instinct toward abstraction -- between his focused, conscious mind and an almost automatic performance. McGraw empties the text of its meaning as he drills down the page, adding layers of guilloche, processing emotions and information into objects of contemplation. Romantic and mathematical, McGraw's work is a log of inputs and external states and an expression of his inner most self.

Evan McGraw, born in 1990 and a graduate of Cooper Union, lives and works in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.



This exhibition was produced with the generous support of Industry Partners and Redcar Properties LTD.

After the attacks of 9/11, supply chains dispersing into New York City from conflict diasporas of the 'global South' were interdicted by a covert biopolitics of mobility deeply rooted in Cold War containments.

Diasporic migrants transiting into the city were captured by mobile policing regimes that imposed 21st century urban containments through next-generations technologies of command-and-control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

City of Redactions examines the legacy topographies of Cold War biopolitics that are presented as backstories for present-day chronicles of conflict diaspora. Superimposed onto the port city's sedimented narratives of control, Natsios' micro-cartographes challenge the global city's post 9/11 identity as nexus of hardened internal boundaries.

New York City's containments are Natsios' autobio(geo)graphic destination as well as her object of study. The City's diasporic geographies recapitulate her own peripatetic upbringing. During the Cold War's quarter century height, her father's stations as a senior officer of the CIA clandestine service mobilized the transient family beneath the redactions of capital cities in seven foreign countries across three continents. Among these lived sites, the Cold War topographies of Greece, Korea and Vietnam have become keys to Natsios's decryptions.

City of Redactions builds on Deborah Natsios' longtime collaboration with John Young -- as New York City architects and co-founders in 1996 of Cryptome, the open access online library that challenges secrecy's regime of the covert, redacted and excluded: "Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance -- open, secret and classified documents -- but not limited to those."

http://www.city-of-redactions.org

- text by Deborah Natsios

W&L consider the territory of the club where these Bears have been placed as a liminoid for potential customization. The detritus of disaster is reclaimed to form an antidote to the mundane. Bad behavior remaps the social codes of nightlife. These flyers list demands and promises the way all flyers demand and promise access and privilege. In Revenge we're seduced by text that reads "PIG ROAST" while a tiny cop awaits his fate in a jar. On the Insecurity flyer we seem to be at a club in the desert along a country's border where "DORAS DRINK FREE" and there is "NO COVER." All the flyers offer "Keys 2the Khroma Klub," a distinct realm of BOY'Dega where the cast revel in the ruins of General Idea's Chroma Key Club.

These durables push the typical layered visuals seen in actual club flyers over the edge of good taste. The images are variously pierced with digital grommets, threaded with diamond necklaces, scaffolded with gold-studded planks, scarred with text, split and then re-bound with trompe-l'oeil laces. The gay hosts are under decorative assault and repair and the viewer is invited to deal directly with the superficial - to "get into it" or get out.

Across from these four flyers hangs the largest work in the exhibition, a 23' (701cm) diagram: The Cave. Simply put, it is a digital club that rests idly on a flatbed truck. (A set piece from episodes 4-10 in transit to the backlot? A place designed perhaps for the BOY'Dega cast to enjoy?) Outside The Cave the night sky is filled with anecdotes, rumors, and gossip about the artists' practice - "BOND SALON was the easiest work we ever made."

In the smaller back room of the gallery, rendered heads of our four hosts float inside their vitrines. ID cards reveal their assets and their talking points. There's no time to determine whether this is the coveted VIP booth or a green room, a memorial or a rehearsal; the bar is flooding nearby. It is into this space - between the real and the imagined, the character and the actor, the fan and creator - that Wickerham & Lomax project their art experience; the artworks providing a sort of systems analysis of the layered architecture that defines their digital and physical output.

Wickerham & Lomax is the collaborative name of Baltimore-based artists Malcolm Lomax (b. 1986, Abbeville, South Carolina) and Daniel Wickerham (b. 1986, Columbus, Ohio). Formerly known as DUOX, the two have been working together since 2009. W&L have developed a searching, nuanced practice that applies a keen critical intuition and fine-tuned irreverence to the problems and potentialities of our contemporary media ecology. Working across diverse media, curatorial platforms, and institutional contexts, they have created a body of work at once context-specific and broadly engaged with networked virtualities. W&L are particularly invested in questions of identity and the body, exploring the impact - profound, ubiquitous, ambivalent - of digital technologies and social spaces on the formation of subjectivities and speculative corporealities. Recent exhibitions by Wickerham & Lomax include the premiere of Encore in the AFTA LYFE at the Artists Space booth, Frieze NY (2014) and BOY'Dega: Edited4Syndication for New Museum's First Look series (2014). Other solo shows include DUOX4Larkin, Artists Space, New York (2012); Liste Exhibition, Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore (2011); Break My Body, Hold My Bones, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, New York (2011); MoMT: Museum of Modern Twink, GLCCB bookstore, Baltimore (2010); and King Me, Open Space Gallery, Baltimore (2009).

An online companion piece to this exhibition can be found here... http://www.duoxduox.com/boyd/girth-proof