With Zen Psychosis: Anatomy of a Dream, at CSULA’s Ronald H. Silverman Gallery, the lustrous pinhole photography of Osceola Refetoff melds with the theme and written words of Shana Nys Dambrot’s lyrical book of the same name.
Curated by Mika Cho, the exhibition makes strong use of Refetoff’s hypnotic pinhole images, many of which were published in the book Zen Psychosis, whose poetic/surreal dream memoir aesthetic is aptly brought to real life (is it real? Or just a dream) in the exhibition. The book mutably blends Refetoff’s evocative visuals with Dambrot’s prose.
Both ask you to recall what do our dreams look like – both in the hidden world of sleep and if they should appear in the waking world. Perhaps they most closely resemble Refetoff’s large-scale Kinematic pinhole, “Whale Spotting,” shot in Antarctica, or the mix of Claymation and live-action stop motion animation swirling through the artist’s short film, “The Savage Sleep.” Also the stuff dreams are made of: sculptural images culled from the photographic artist’s collection of found objects, including an adorable black cat; and of course, the hypnotic words that propel readers into a dream state when reading Dambrot’s book.
Like Refetoff’s mysteriously magical pinhole images themselves, the exhibition is blissfully seeped in surrealism and respectful wonder at the natural world, of which dreaming is an intrinsic part. The pinhole process requires long shutter times, as images are shot thru a tiny pinhole instead of a lens; likewise, both exhibition and book require of viewers a slow survey of the strange beauty that surrounds us – the stuff of dreams.
Just as the Eurythmics sang in the fever dream years of the 1980s, “Sweet dreams are made of this/ Who am I to disagree/I travel the world and the seven seas/Everybody’s looking for something.”
Should that something be a trippy beauty, or a porthole to some other ArtWorld (or even this one), get your Zen on while you can.
The gallery is located on the CSULA campus in the Fine Arts Building. The exhibition will have a closing reception with a reading and book signing by Dambrot Tuesday November 14th from 6- 8 p.m.; it runs through the 16th.
- Genie Davis; images provided by gallery