Panos Tsagaris

 

THE WEST AT SUNSET
December 9, 2010-February 20, 2011
Opening Reception: Thursday, December 9 - 6-8 pm
Public Programming Event: Saturday, January 29 - 2-9 pm

The Abrons Arts Center is proud to present The West at Sunset, a multidisciplinary group exhibition in response to a masterwork of spiritual literature, Rene Daumal¢s 1952 novel Mount Analogue.

Artists:
Jaq Belcher
Alberto Borea
Amy Finkbeiner
MaryKate Maher
Rachel Pollak
Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff
Adam Parker Smith
Panos Tsagaris

Curator:  Adrian Geraldo Saldaña

Mount Analogue, a surrealist allegory of an expedition to the top of a holy mountain, garnered Daumal considerable recognition in France as a poet and student of mysticism. Unfinished due to his death from tuberculosis, the text notably provided the premise for Alejandro Jodorowsky¢s 1973 film The Holy Mountain. The West at Sunset displays, in works installed throughout the Abrons Arts Center¢s multiple gallery spaces, the imagined remnants of this journey.

The concept of the mountain climb appealed to Daumal because, like his vision of spirituality, it involves both transcendent impulses and practical considerations. The novel, and the exhibition, seeks the possibility of holy sparks, but embedded in the world of matter — physical bodies, topographies and landscapes, water, and air. The exhibition brings together a group of contemporary artists whose practice considers our perception of space and geography with a second group whose forms and concepts depict ritualized human behavior.

The title of the exhibition refers to the particular alignment of the travelers¢ ship that allows it to access the mountain, bridging the invisible and material worlds. Multiple installations in the exhibition are likewise modified by the shadows and the light created by the changing position of the sun, forging a living environment that shifts from day to night and back again.

Taken as a whole, The West at Sunset explores and finally confirms the spiritual and transcendent potential of human behavior within the natural world.