Label Curatorial
Luminaries of Light & Space
- Curated by Laura Whitcomb
- Presented by LAWA and Dublab at LAX October 20, 2022-October 20,2025
More information Here
Generating Future Forms:
Bay Convergences of Art and Music 1958-1972
City Lights celebrates the publication of DILEXI: A Gallery & Beyond – By Laura Whitcomb – Forwards by Peter Frank and Jim Newman – Produced by Label Curatorial
Past Exhibition:
Center for the Arts
Eagle Rock
Tertium Organum
2225 Eagle Rock Boulevard, LA, 90041
Center for the Arts Catalogue
Artists Pamela Boden, Lynn Chadwick, Harry Kramer, Mark di Suvero, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Gordon Onslow Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, Martin Puryear, Minor White
Fariba Bogzaran, Mary Brogger, Claire Chambless, Ron Reihel, Lindsey Nobel, Marco Minaya, Suzanne Treister, Vincent Pocsik,
Laura Whitcomb Curator
The Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, The Pasadena Art Alliance and Label Curatorial present the first installment of an exhibition documenting how mathematics has been a foundational tool to convey the unknown through the course of art history. This exhibition explores the fin du siecle phenomenon where higher geometry and advanced mathematics emerged from communities engaging the esoteric schools and their revival of lost wisdom.
This exhibition is based on the Ukrainian-born P.D. Ouspensky’s landmark publication Tertium Organum (1912) which transformed the conception of the nature of reality by engaging the Fourth Dimension in the years before Einstein’s explorations were widely distributed. Ouspensky posited a new metaphysical approach through the advances of science and higher mathematics and this exhibition explores artists engaging anthromophisism, hybridity, portals to enter the unseen and the mapping of space and unseen dimensions. Ouspensky’s publications were foundational to renowned artists of Suprematiism, Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism. The exhibition includes the artists of the California Dynaton Movement Gordon Onslow Ford and Wolfgang Paalen as well their close friend Roberto Matta whose work was transformed by Ouspensky’s ideas of art opening portals into unseen dimensions. This exhibition explores artists engaging his theories and philosophies outlined in Tertium Organum as well as his mentor Guirdjieff consciously and implicitly. This exhibition prepares its audience for Part 2 of the platform Investigating The Convergence of Mysticism and Mathematics as it explores the radical shifts when art convergences with scientific advance.
About Label Curatorial
Label Curatorial develops exhibitions, catalogs, auxiliary programming, site-specific work, performances and public discussions for art institutions, galleries, museums, cultural and educational centers worldwide. The curatorial exhibitions are painstakingly researched bringing in field experts internationally through a network of scholar alliances while consulting the curatorial’s own research archive that has been amassed over a period of 30 years. Label Curatorial offers a full service operation maintaining and establishing historical archives and databases and scholarship on little known artists and movements that have altered and enriched the historical record of American and European art.
Label Curatorial's events focus on the convergence of the philosophical and theoretical connective tissue between varying artistic media. Label Curatorial's shows are most notable for creating powerful auxiliary performances of music, dance and performance finding alliances which engage the themes of the exhibition. Label Curatorial has a particular focus on the art of California and selects landmark historical buildings to stage its shows. The curatorial commits to a major exhibition once a year pro bono to assist nonprofits, offering them historically enriching programming.
Assistant Curator Narin Dickerson
Special Thanks:
The Landing, S.C. Art Transport and Lucid Art Foundation
Label Curatorial is notable for its archive work and advisory for nonprofits and artists' estates. The curatorial has organized the archives of the Surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, the explorer ethnographer Douchon Gersi, the electronic music pioneer/artist/photographer Warner Jepson, the Swiss born photographer and Salvador Dalí collaborator Jean Clemmer and the Black Mountain alumnus, painter and founder of the Beat era North Beach epicenter The Place, Leo Krikorian. The curatorial has also assembled the first archives of historic galleries which have resulted in exhibitions such as the 2019 Dilexi Retrospective and the 2018 Artists and Visionaries of the S.S. Vallejo at the Sonoma Valley Museum. In these instances Label Curatorial preserved archives in perilous conditions while finding critical letters, ephemera, lost films, photographs that have been exhibited in museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide. Label brought to the public sphere film stills of the only film directed by Dalí which was destroyed in a fire which became the basis of an exhibition at the Galleria Sozzani in Milan in 2018. Recent projects include assembling an archive and timeline of the little known mediumist artist Paulina Peavy which has brought a new understanding to Southern California linking Synchromism, The Group of Eight, the Surrealists and Hans Hofmann to an unknown vibrant art scene in the South Bay. This exhibition, Paulina Peavy: An Etherian Channeler, is extended to August 14, 2021 at Beyond Baroque's Mike Kelley Gallery 681 Venice Boulevard, Venice, Los Angeles, Ca. 90291. The catalog will be published through the Andrew Edlin Gallery and the Estate of Paulina Peavy.
Recent Events
Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond NY EVENT
Saturday December 11, 3:00 PM, 2021
Dilexi Book Signing Screening and Artist Talk
Ethan Cohen Gallery
Edwin Schlossberg: Once Upon a Time When We Were Conscious
251 W 19th St, New York, NY 10011
This Saturday will see a New York book signing with Dilexi filmmaker Edwin Schlossberg screening his film Making Visible, narrated by the artist and Buckminster Fuller, with a historic cameo by Andy Warhol. Author Laura Whitcomb and artist Edwin Schlossberg will follow with a discussion moderated by Melik Kaylan with the Dilexi research director Narin Dickerson in attendance. The book is available at 192 Books and Printed Matter in New York; William Stout Architectural books in San Francisco and Artbook @ Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles.
Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond documents the interdisciplinary approach of the renowned California gallery Dilexi (1958-1969) and its aftermath when founder Jim Newman, influenced by Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message," aspired beyond the gallery walls and commissioned a series of groundbreaking artist films which sought to transform a wider cultural demographic through broadcast television. The Dilexi Foundation films debuted on the television station KQED in 1969 in San Francisco, and are considered a model for what became the genre of "guerilla television." Directors and artists of this commissioned series include Walter De Maria's Hardcore, Andy Warhol's Paul Swan, Robert Frank's Conversations in Vermont, Anna Halprin's Right On, Yvonne Rainer's Dance Fractions for the West Coast and Dilexi Gallery artist Philip Makanna's The Empire of Things. The films also documented the agitprop performances of Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater and the little-known activist theater practitioner Ken Dewey, the musician Frank Zappa, as well as Bay Area filmmaker Robert Nelson's What Shall We Talk About? collaborating with the recently passed William Wiley in a lampoon of the talk show format.
These groundbreaking artists were given an uncensored platform by the Dilexi Foundation, offering unfiltered windows into a year which was one of the most radical in the second half of the 20th century. One film which synthesizes both the existential crisis of this tumultuous year, while offering a philosophic roadmap to navigate it, was Edwin Schlossberg's Dilexi film Making Visible. The then 23-year-old Edwin Schlossberg offered a deeply contemplative and philosophical exploration of the unseen dynamics and metaphysical shifts catalyzed through the apparatus of television. The film explores the broadcast mechanism as an information system distributed through electromagnetic waves that pose ulterior powers as yet not considered. The film visually synthesizes the visual postulations of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle while Schlossberg's collaborator of the time, Buckminster Fuller, navigates the viewer through the leaps of technology to better understand and apply communications theory to daily life. The film, which was made the year astronauts landed on the moon, proclaims "the eyes of television are more powerful than the eyes of society," providing an unfiltered window into both the existential crisis of its era and how television may be used as a means to enlist a new consciousness rather than generate a conforming paradigm, while implicitly warning of how it could become an imminent tool of disinformation. Historically notable is the fact the film presents a series of cameos by Andy Warhol, who becomes the subject of Schlossberg's camera lens, presenting a series of signs that question the role of the generated image and our inherent trust of its disseminating power by virtue of its documentation.
Making Visible was recently presented on the West Coast in 2018 when Steve Seid of the Pacific Film Archive organized an exhibition at the McEvoy Center in San Francisco, and in Los Angeles during the Dilexi Retrospective organized by Whitcomb in 2019, which included six West Coast galleries (Crown Point Press and Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco, and Parker Gallery, the Landing, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, and Parrasch Heijnen in Los Angeles). These galleries presented iterations of Dilexi's programming 50 years after its closing. Eight years of research has now become the publication Dilexi: A Gallery and Beyond which documents these films as a cohesive body for the first time, and provides biographies of all the participating artist/directors. The book was edited and art directed by Jim Newman, the Dilexi founder, and includes supplementary essays and excerpts from the art critic Peter Frank, the recently passed Expanded Cinema author Gene Youngblood, former Whitney Museum of American Art curator Jay Sanders, film critic Antoine Thirion, and Pacific Film Archive of the Berkeley Museum curator Steve Seid. The book will be available in the gallery with a talk to close Edwin Schlossberg's solo show at Ethan Cohen Gallery on December 11 2021.
Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond Official Book Launch
San Francisco
Rena Bransten Gallery
Saturday Book Signing and Cocktails
11 AM - 2PM November 20, 2021
Rena Bransten Gallery, Minnesota Street Projects
1275 Minnesota St, San Francisco, CA 94107
Other Minds Presents David Brower Center
Sunday Panel Discussion and Performance
2PM - 5PM Sunday November 21
Panel Discussion Moderated by Charles Desmarais with Dilexi Founder Jim Newman and Gyan Riley Performance
Talks by author Laura Whitcomb and Berkeley Museum and Paciifc Film Archive curator Steve Seid
Goldman Theater, David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way 94704 Berkeley, CA, US.
Free to the Public, Wine Served
Mask and Vaccinations required
New York December 11, 2021 3PM
Film Screening Dilexi Film Foundation
Making Visible (1969)
Author Discussion with Artist Edwin Schlossberg
251 W 19th St, New York, NY 10011
Past Show Show: Paulina Peavy Etherian Channeler June 5-August 14, 2021
SOUND DISCARNATE performances after Paulina Peavy featuring: Micaela Tobin, Braden Diotte, Zane Reynolds (SFVacid), & David Tibet & Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson’s presentation of Harry Oldfield. DJ set by Greg Bishop 5 p.m. Gallery viewing, outdoor reception, & DJ set 8 p.m. Performances co-presented by Label Curatorial. Free & in-person at Beyond Baroque. Masks required.
July 31st presents an evening of performances throughout the building and climaxing in the theatre. Performances with renowned artists that have explored hermetic traditions engage the exhibition’s expansive investigations which unveil both Peavy’s oeuvre and capacity to provide a mediumistic agency for each viewer. Performances will explore the modalities of language and communication that pervade the convergence of esotericism and astro culture.
August 11 Perseid Meteor Shower Co-Hosted Beyond Baroque/ Dublab
Beyond Baroque, Label Curatorial, and dublab present the concluding event of the exhibition Paulina Peavy: Etherian Channeler. Featuring a night of sound performances in dialog with Peavy’s astrocultural films, this event will take place at the peak of the Perseid Meteor Showers at a private venue just outside the west entrance of Joshua Tree National Park. Featuring the collective Omar Zubair (Wooster group), Maneesh Raj Madahar (The Chalet / Gagosian, Piero Golia), DivineBrick, Michael Glover and Mike Meanstreatz, SFVAcid, Mitchell Brown's Tinseltown and DJ Professor Cantaloupe.