Our beloved OHO, Hymenaeus Beta, tipped us off to the fact that the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is extending the run of the Cameron exhibit Klagsburn is hosting at her gallery located at 526 West 26th Street, Room 318. The show reopens September 2 and runs till October 11. The NY Times said:
Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel (1922-1955), better known simply as Cameron, had many creative pursuits. She drew maps for the U.S. Navy during World War II. She married the rocket engineer Jack Parsons, who introduced her the Ordo Templi Orientis, a secret society then under the direction of Aleister Crowley. She wrote poetry. She appeared opposite Anaïs Nin in Kenneth Anger’s “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome,” and she made strange, evocative drawings. In 1957, according to Michael Duncan’s catalog essay for an earlier show, the Los Angeles Police Department closed a show at Ferus Gallery because of her virtuosic ink-on-paper depiction of an erotic peyote trip.
None of the figurative drawings in this show are quite as polished, or as unnerving, as the woman making love to a demon in “Untitled (Peyote Vision), 1955.” But they all share that drawing’s connection to the occult, for good or ill.
The sense that three colorful dancing figures in animal masks, in gouache on black paper, are on their way to a mystical midnight rite lends the piece some extra potency. But it may also send you looking for an answer key.
A series of ink drawings from the late 1970s and early ’80s, on the other hand, all titled “Pluto Transiting the Twelfth House,” trade the claustrophobic portentousness of esoterica for the more open-ended meanings of fine art. Made with two pens “automatically” — that is, without the artist’s conscious control of her hands — they have gentle but energetic wood-grain-like patterns that evoke spiritual seismographs. Looking at them, I almost thought I could hear whispering in the background. WILL HEINRICH
