A gate//A veil//A vessel

Exhibition combining ritual, art and magic at Field Projects Gallery (NYC) and Home Gallery, featuring the art of three witches, including such items as a woven summoning rug, dyed, translucent veils, performance documentation and a Ghostly Practice based ritual movement workshop.

Art and witchcraft are mediums of conjuring. Witches and artists bring things into being and connect (or perhaps collapse) the present with the past. Each of the artists in this exhibition creates work deeply tied to history through a combination of ritual practice and research centered on their ancestors, feminist icons, ghosts, reclaimed demons or revived women.

Jacquelyn Marie Shannon uses her body as a vehicle for engaging with spirit through ‘Ghostly Practice,’ a ritual art drawing from nearly fifteen years of training in Japanese butoh, expressionist dance, and physical theatre. She investigates spectrality and liminality, memory and haunting, affect, and alternative temporalities. Krystal DiFronzo works on pharmakon and the grey areas between medicine, poison, desire, illness, and its effect on femme bodies and labor through exploitation and myth. This produces natural dye-painted banners that tell spectral narratives with an alchemical unpredictability. Chiara No creates sigil carpets and rugbeaters, works that conjure herstory through the play of naming. “Naming is a process of creation, bestowing life or soul upon in a human, object or idea.” No looks to the demon(ized) of history–– the heretic, the midwife, the hermit, the foreigner–– as ancestral comrades.

In combining art and witchcraft, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Krystal DiFronzo, and Chiara No produce bodies of independent feminist ritual works living in the betwixt: from earth to salt, necromancy to spectrality, and alternative temporalities.