Where We Are is Real

Where We Are is Real November 1 - 2024 Zg Gallery, 300 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60654

In Where We Are Is Real, Jackie Tileston continues to reference a range of interests from cultural hybridity to critical theory and non-ordinary states of consciousness, using abstraction as a language to mediate between the ephemeral and the physical. The new work incorporates her practices in meditation, trance techniques and entheogenic experiences into experimental and conceptual processes based in automatic drawing, which the artist sees as exploring different forms of research and accessing knowledge.

Rooted in nondual tantric philosophy, the work embodies the idea that everything is an ecstatic manifestation of Awareness - consciousness appearing as this world, glorious, weird, and immanent. These paintings and drawings function as energy transmissions, like a tuning fork capturing vibrations – patterns of information and pulsing frequencies coalescing into forms, movements, and nothingness. This view delights in Consciousness as the ultimate hyperobject.

Tileston has recently experimented with new methods to more directly engage with these energetic processes. Over multiple sessions, she layers veils of color using the ground of the paintings as a field in which forms and color arise and dissolve. After a trance breathwork session and meditation, she engages in automatic drawing with her eyes closed, creating a foundation that acts as scaffolding upon which the rest of the painting is developed. Thicker layers of paint, exclamations of color, and accumulations of forms evolve into rich visual compositions.

These works can be seen as topographic maps of unknown realms, expressions of cosmic play, or the visual equivalent of sound waves emerging from a field of potential.

In the language of the supranormal, those who encounter non-ordinary phenomena are called “experiencers” – and Tileston invites her viewers to become experiencers too, opening themselves to the expansive states of awareness her works emerge from.