Cosmic Geometries: The Prairie's Edge Catalogue

Cosmic Geometries: The Prairie’s Edge

Cover Image (front and back): Installation view with work by Mike Cloud and Rachel Hayes (above)

Cosmic Geometries: The Prairie’s Edge April 12 - June 1, 2024

Candida Alvarez, Elijah Burgher, Holly Cahill, Mike Cloud, Gianna Commito, Edie Fake, Vanessa Filley, Julia Fish, Beverly Fishman, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Azadeh Gholizadeh, Michelle Grabner, Christina Haglid, Rachel Hayes, Gina Hunt, Michiko Itatani, Miyoko Ito, Anna Kunz, Alice Lauffer, Aya Nakamura, Deb Sokolow, May Tveit, Georgina Valverde, Susan C. White, Amy Yoes, and Jade Yumang

Curated by Hilma’s Ghost

Photographs by Nathan Keay

Cosmic Geometries: The Prairie’s Edge Curated by Hilma’s Ghost

Cosmic Geometries: The Prairie's Edge is a group exhibition of intergenerational and intersectional artists either based in the Midwest or adjacent to it, that examines the spiritual and aesthetic functions of abstract painting and geometry in art. The artists deploy a range of painterly devices to create cosmic and transcendental visions that combine esoteric world traditions with the language of Modernism. Their motifs are inspired by sources as divergent as Islamic architecture, Buddhist mandalas, Hindu yantras, medieval Christian stained-glass windows, and quantum mechanics, rendering formal devices that range from optical illusions, to elaborate ornamentation techniques.

These artists primarily work with the language of painting, but also draw from languages and materials adapted from sculpture, installation, craft, and textiles. Within these works lies a rich affection for color, shape, and compositional elements, which reveal the daring sensibilities that artists are bringing to the historically overlooked arena of the spiritual in art. These artists' practices build upon palimpsest legacies of alternative power structures that are constantly being erased. ­In January 2022, Hilma’s Ghost curated the collective’s first curatorial project Cosmic Geometries at EFA Project Space in New York. That show had 25 intergenerational and diverse artists primarily working in New York, but also a few international and historical artists. Cosmic Geometries: The Prairie's Edge will focus on 26 artists living, from and/or strongly associated with the Midwest, and also include several historically significant artists. The focus of both these exhibitions is primarily on women, nonbinary, and trans artists as that aligns with the mission of the collective.

ABOUT THE CURATION PROCESS

After curators Sharmistha Ray and Dannielle Tegeder selected work for the exhibition, the gallery engaged Sarah Potter, a professional witch, to do use tarot to guide the physical placement of the art in the gallery. As was the case for placement in the first iteration of Cosmic Geometries (at the Elizabeth Foundation), arrangement the artwork in Cosmic Geometries: The Prairie’s Edge, tarot cards were drawn at random from the ABSTRACT FUTURES Tarot Deck by Hilma’s Ghost (beginning with the twentytwo Major Arcana)- one assigned to each artist in alphabetical order. The art work in the exhibition was then hung in order of the cards - from The Fool (0) to The World (22). The remaining 4 artworks were drawn from the suite of Pentacles. Remarkably, or perhaps not remarkably, the final placement of the artworks were faithful to their tarot pairs that are hung alongside them in the exhibition. We have included pulled cards with each artwork in this catalogue in order to invite the reader an opportunity for noticing the uncanny affinities between the tarot cards and the art on display, and to share in the sense of magic that was threaded throughout.

ALICE LAUFFER

Although it was not until the very end of the 1960’s, near her fiftieth year, that Alice Lauffer came into her artistic maturity, the previous decade had by no means been without activity for her. It was during those year that, Lauffer, under the professional name of Loray-Comte, worked as a highly successful independent commercial artist.

She also expanded on her earlier training at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts by attending night classes at the School of the Art Insistute of Chicago and by studying with Paul Weighardt at the Evanston Art Center. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, Lauffer was also a regular (and rather successful) participant at he major summer art fairs held in the Chicago area, where she exhibited watercolors.

It is difficult to document the chronology precisely here - she rarely dated her works but at a moment in 1968 Lauffer turned her attention to the airbrush and the ellipse, and would turn these two elements into the touchstone of her art. Her command of the airbrush dated to her experiences as a commercial artist, and her application of it to these paintings seems to reflect a desire for an autonomy of touch, a removal of direct manila interaction with the surface of the paintings, replacing contact with something more subtle and more pristine. In this, and in her urge toward abstraction and in the sequential examination of a formal device, Lauffer was in accord with many of the concerns activating the national art scene at that moment, resulting in the movement we now identify as Minimalism.

The Ellipse or oval shapes that were called into being with her airbrush certainly had special significance for Lauffer. It is a pleasingly volumetric shape, and Lauffer engaged it in endless episodes of intriguing modeling. The not-so-subtle female overtones of the shape were also fully exploited, and by the end of the 1970’s Lauffer was using titles like Phaedra, Andromeda, DNA Totem, and Receptor. This egg-like shape could (and did) easily metamorphose into flower bud or vulva, rich and evocative and sensual, an object of consummate design that is capable of continual extrapolation.

EXCERPTED FROM “Alice Lauffer: The Perseverance of Vision” by James Yood, and published in Alice Lauffer - A Retrospective Exhibition on the occasion of her exhibition at the Illinois State Museum in 1988.

Phaedra, 1976 Acrylic on canvas 61.5 x 49.5 inches Courtesy the Illinois State Museum

Sphinx, 1977 Watercolor on paper 30 x 22 inches Courtesy the Illinois State Museum

GEORGINA VALVERDE

"...I frequently use crochet, a technique that was passed down to me by my maternal grandmother, who in turn learned it from her mother. The series, Atavia, consists of three tower-like structures, each dedicated to three women ancestors whose energy and life work has had an impact on me (see attached statement). The towers were inspired by the transmission towers that dominate the landscape around the area of Gray, Indiana. The idea of somehow transmitting messages to my grandmothers and great grandmothers through manual work that I inherited from them was a seed for the work.

The magic I seek is to awaken in the viewer the awe that I feel about the material world and its possibilities, something that gets lost in the rush from consumption to discarding. I embrace a posthumanist view of materials (Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter); I see materials as exerting their own agency and energies on humans and deserving of our care and consideration."

- Georgina Valverde

Vessel (For Mathilde Gartner), 2019 Mixed media 72 x 27.5 x 27.5 inches Courtesy the artist

Beacon, 2019 Mixed Media 65 x 17.5 x 17.5 inches Courtesy the artist

CHRISTINA HAGLID

There is something profoundly reassuring about the smooth solidity of the forms anchoring Christina Haglid's compositions. More sculptural than two-dimensional in effect, these works on paper depict shapes as concrete and convincing as they are wholly imagined. With their focus on glowing light, gleaming water, and curved matte surfaces in calm, earth-tone palettes, Haglid's serene yet mysterious compositions open like windows on worlds that both soothe and beckon. To gaze through these windows at Haglid's imagined realities is to partake of a solace and serenity more vital in these anxious and uncertain times than ever.

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann, editors.

Posit Journal, May, 2021.

Christina Haglid work courtesy the artist and Gallery Victor

Brick Light, 2020 Watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches

Monolith No. 5, 2020 Watercolor and gouache on paper 8 x 9 inches

Gray Rainbow, 2020 Watercolor and gouache on paper 8 x 9 inches

Open Skies, 2020 Watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches

Monolith No. 4, 2020 Watercolor and gouache on paper 8 x 9 inches

Emerald, 2020 Watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches

Midnight Nest, 2022 Watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches

Little Moon, 2019 Watercolor and gouache on paper 8 x 9 inches

Grotto, 2020 Watercolor and gouache on paper 8 x 9 inches

Cloud Stone, 2021 Watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches

Gentle Winter, 2021 Watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches

Night Forest, 2020 Watercolor and gouache on paper 8 x 9 inches

Neowise, 2020 Watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches

Bent Rainbow, 2021 Watercolor and gouache on paper 7.5 x 8.5 inches

Juniper Skyway, 2020 Watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches

Cloud Record, 2023 Watercolor and gouache on paper 11 x 8 inches

GIANNA COMMITO

Thurn, 2023 Casein and clay ground on panel 48 x 40 inches Courtesy the artist and Abattoir Gallery

VANESSA FILLEY

"Vanessa Filley describes a recent body of work as 'imagined cosmic map(s),' charts that connect the traditions of fiber arts with the present and the artists own questions of finding one's place in the world. Titled In the Delicate Meshes, the series is comprised of sewn pieces that Filley lies to quilts, with stitches layers into symmetric patchworks of color, and texture, 'I am interested in the energetic threads that orient and connect us, found us in t place and time, yet tether us to our ancestral past and future - the lines that bring us home,' she says.

Filley references artists like Lenore Tawney, Hilma af Klint and the women of Gees Bend Quilters, whose practices accent to spirituality, nature and ancestral histories.

Taut threads and twists embody tension and connection between both ends of a stitch, the intricate structures of the works as a whole, and the long tradition of fiber arts. 'Each piece in this series is a quilted conversation, a way of taking the disparate questions of feelings of a given moment and mingling them with inspiration from the outside world and the work of those came before,' the artist says."

- Grace Ebert "Artist Vanessa Filley Stitches Meditative Cosmic Maps Brimming with Geometry and Symmetries" April, 2023, Colossal.

Merge + Divide, 2021 Gouache on panel 56.5 x 44 inches Courtesy the artist

MICHIKO ITATANI

“Three Body Problem” painting from the Tesseract Study 21 B-4, 2021 Oil on canvas 96 x 78 inches Courtesy private collection

AZADEH GHOLIZADEH

The Tree, 2022 Wool and wood 27 x 11 x 67 inches Courtesy the artist and Goldfinch Gallery

ELIJAH BURGHER

Hex Centrifuge, 2015 Colored pencil on paper 28.25 x 23 inches Courtesy the artist and Western Exhibitions

EDIE FAKE

All work courtesy the artist and Western Exhibitions

Mercury Pavilion, 2022 Graphite and collage on paper 34 x 27 inches

After Hours, 2021 Gouache on panel 24 x 18 inches

The Long and Short of It, 2021 Gouache on panel 14 x 11 inches

Strange and New, 2021 Gouache on panel 14 x 11 inches

BEVERLY FISHMAN

Untitled (Epilepsy, Anxiety, Depression), 2019 / 2024 Urethane paint on wood 43 x 41 x 2 inches Courtesy the artist and Miles McEnery Gallery

MIYOKO ITO

Untitled, 1955 Oil on canvas 50 x 36 inches Courtesy private collection

RACHEL HAYES

Rachel Hayes creates large-scale installations of fabric that infuse color and form into architectural and natural environments.

Hayes’s celebrated geometric fiber artworks refer to abstract painting and incorporate colors and sightlines of their surrounding environment. These elaborate textiles respond to and highlight the beauty of a space, transforming it. In Field of Vision, Hayes brings together a collection of skies, sunsets, and billowing clouds printed on nylon that together animate the Crossroads Hotel gallery — their opaque and translucent color and textures create a spatial dance that lures visitors into this inspiring place.

Trained in fiber arts, Hayes explores the ways her textile pieces and their compositional features, like materiality, scale, color, and line, engage with different environments and reframe our world. She creates large, geometric fabric installations from repurposed nylon, polyester, and cotton segments, and arranges them into grid-like compositions that recall abstract color-block painting and American quilt- making traditions. Often draped over expansive areas, like the deserts of White Sands National Park in New Mexico or the marble corridors of Oklahoma’s Capitol Building, her monumental works offer immersive experiences and redefine their site-specific environments. They also push the limits of their delicate materials, defying narrow definitions of “women’s work,” craft, and sculpture. By confounding various forms of artistic expression, Hayes’s works complicate notions of fragility and power, and invite new ways to engage with our surroundings.

- Haley Clouser, curator

Field of Vision, 2022 Nylon, polyester and thread 80 x 78 inches Courtesy the artist

CANDIDA ALVAREZ

c.c.3, 2014 Acrylic on cotton 25.25 x 25.75 inches All works courtesy the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery

c.c.4, 2014 Enamel and acrylic on cotton 25.25 x 25.75 inches

c.c.5, 2014 Enamel and acrylic on cotton 25.25 x 25.75 inches

AYA NAKAMURA

Alphabet, 2021 Colored pencil on artist-made paper 19.5 x 16 inches Courtesy the artist and Western Exhibitions

MICHELLE GRABNER

The Wisconsin-born and based artist Michelle Grabner is known for her broad perspective developed as teacher, writer and critic over the past 30 years. The site where it all comes together is the studio.

Her artmaking—which encompasses a variety of mediums including drawing, painting, video and sculpture—is driven by a distinctive value in the productivity of work and takes place outside of dominant systems. Grabner instead finds a creative center in operating across platforms and towards community.

Central to the work is process. Grabner uncovers new dynamic relationships through her visionary practice of repetition. With a deep attention to abstract patterns and all the metaphors they conjure, Grabner pushes the limits of compositional structures to discover the tipping point between stability and precariousness; between continuance and wondrous difference. Grabner states of her work,“I have always been a painter who examines various power structures inherent in patterns and abstract arrangements. Because I believe that all forms are political, I have committed myself and 30 years of painting to re-articulating vernacular patterns in order to shift the unobserved into critical sight. This general overview has been foundational to my studio work since 1990.”

Untitled I, 2024 Silver on masonry artifact: Pabst Mansion Carriage House, Milwaukee WI 25 x 25 x 17 inches each Courtesy the artist and Mickey Gallery

Untitled II, 2024 Silver on masonry artifact: Pabst Mansion Carriage House, Milwaukee WI 25 x 25 x 17 inches each Courtesy the artist and Mickey Gallery

MAY TVEIT

Say Yes, 2017 corrugated cardboard 85 x 68 x 3 inches All works courtesy the artist

All is Well, 2021 Monoprint and ink on paper 48 x 34 inches

The Road, 2017 Corrugated cardbord 68 x 29.5 x 7 inches

Joy, 2021 Monoprint, ink on paper, Rives BFK 30 x 22 inches

Love Deluxe 2, 2021 Monoprint, ink on paper, Rives BFK 30 x 22 inches

The Window, 2017 Corrugated cardboard 68 x 55 x 6 inches

JULIA FISH

First plan for floor [ floret ] — section one, 1998 Gouache on assembled, laser-printed paper 23.25 x 23.25 inches © Julia Fish, Courtesy David Nolan Gallery

DIANA GUERRERO-MACIÁ

Diana Guerrero-Macia is an artist working in the expanded fields of painting and textiles. She values craft, consciousness, sustainability, and material metaphor. Her studio practice, spanning over twenty-five years, includes slow-craft processes in painting, textiles, drawing, print, and sculptural objects. Guerrero-Maciá is most known for her Unpainted Pictures – paintings constructed with textile cutwork, stitching, collaging, and dye that she began working on in the early 1990’s and continues to make today. The haptic moments of touch, revealed in her materials, compiled over years, folded into colorful abstractions, holds time. Color and decoration, in all their expansiveness and elusiveness, are integral to Guerrero-Maciá’s work. As a child of exile, she recognizes that history, form, and identity are ever changing and her art champions transformation. She samples equally from lived experience, internet databases, and Modernist & Medieval works of art, among many random sources.

Stranger no. 1, 2023 Canvas, dye, deconstructed clothing, driftwood, Shou sugi ban turned cedar, textiles, gouache and buttons on canvas 57.5 x 49.5 inches Courtesy the artist

ANNA KUNZ

Moss, 2023 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 66 inches Courtesy the artist and Alexander Berggruen gallery

SUSAN C. WHITE

Gathering, 2023 Acrylic and glassine on canvas 74 x 60 inches Courtesy the artist

GINA HUNT

Beam Splitter, 2023 Acrylic on cut canvas and poplar 60 x 45 inches Courtesy the artist and 65 GRAND

HOLLY CAHILL

I choose to work with fiber materials inherent to painting as a way of aligning myself with other female artists past and present who have too often been anonymous and marginalized from art historical movements. Their work is an extraordinary benefit to all artists and has expanded my views of what is possible in my practice. I have been sewing my paintings for the past 20 years although am completely self-taught in this regard. Sewing knowledge skipped a generation in my household. My grandmother used to hem our catholic school uniforms and I recall finding her ability to alter what came to us as a mass-manufactured item intended to suppress individual expression powerful. Collage has also become central to my approach to working.

My mother, although not an artist, made large and ambitious collages for each of her three girls that included photographs of us at various stages in our childhood through high school. Perhaps that is partly why I see collage as a form of time travel: a thread that carries from one work to the next and reminds me of my mother’s loving gesture, releasing us into our adult lives by filling the page with the lived memories that bind us to one another.I view my working process as an energetic and spiritual act where the method and materials take shape in unexpected ways once I’m able to enter into a flow of making. Navigating my way to this place where I can allow the unfolding to take root and give myself over to it, is to hold close what drives my work: the earth beneath our feet, the trees swaying, the animals moving around me on long walks outdoors are with me as I’m finding those gestures where the materials that can express their complexity better than I could depict them in some rigid way.

Once I received the news that Piercing the Storm was selected for Cosmic Geometries, I happened to look back on my Guggenheim Museum catalog of Paintings for the Future and noticed some striking similarities to Hilma af Klint’s Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece from 1915. Both her work and mine show a dark triangular figure piercing into a circle of light; a duality of forces coexisting together.

Piercing the Storm responds to extreme weather conditions resulting from climate change and reflects on the impossibility of halting a storm in flux. Beginning with paintings of elemental fields of activity that are then collaged and sewn into new configurations, it focuses on erosion, rain, light, and soil, while also referring to the architectural feature of an archway brought together through piecing. Coincidently, I began this work just before a major hurricane hit my family’s house, flooding it and upending their lives in the process. Thankfully, they survived, although changed. This mysterious set of events serves as a reminder of the need to care for our frayed It has been such a pleasure learning more about the work of Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray as Hilma’s Ghost and taking a deeper dive into Hilma af Klint’s work and life as an artist. I’m struck by how Hilma af Klint’s work looked to nature as a source of the interconnected cosmic forces around us while using a language of abstraction to unravel narratives of other dimensions. I am grateful for the work of Hilma’s Ghost that is shedding light on spiritual aspects of artistic practice that have too often been dismissed, uplifting women past and present along the way. That gratitude extends as well to Britton Bertran and Carrie Secrist for hosting this exhibition at Secrist | Beach.

- Holly Cahill

Piercing the Storm, 2022 Acrylic on canvas 58 x 84 x 12 inches Courtesy the artist

DEB SOKOLOW

Visualizing Things Hidden Inside Walls (More Things Than Usual), 2014 Graphite, crayon, colored pencil, pastel and collage on paper 37 x 29 x 2.25 inches Courtesy the artist and Western Exhibitions

Visualizing Four Rooms and a Hall Engineered for Temporary Disappearances, 2021 Graphite, crayon, colored pencil, pastel and collage on paper 37 x 29 x 2.25 inches Courtesy the artist and Western Exhibitions

AMY YOES

Synform_2401, 2023 Printed/ painted canvas soft sculpture 34 x 36 x 10 inches Courtesy the artist

JADE YUMANG

Don’t Leave Me, Fante, 2017 Mixed media 42 x 19 x 10 inches Courtesy the artist

MIKE CLOUD

Business Idea Beyond Grub and Weevil, 2020 Oil on canvas and mixed media 118 x 33 x 3.5 inches All works courtesy the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery

Hello Andrew Garcia, 2020 Oil on linen with mixed media 42 x 19 x 10 inches

Untitled (Shopping List), 2020 Oil on canvas and mixed media 118 x 33 x 9 inches

ABOUT THE CURATORS Hilma's Ghost, a feminist artist collective, was co-founded by Brooklyn-based artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray in 2020. The collective seeks to address existing art historical gaps by curtivating a global network of women, nonbinary, and trans practitioners whose work addresses spirituality. Hilma af Klint's groundbreaking exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2018 served as a reckoning for art history's blindspots, especially for women artists considered too 'mystical' for the conservative art world.

Named after af Klint, Hilma's Ghost believes that western hetero-patriarchal societies maintain a false binary between spirituality and science. This bias serves to overlook womxn artists whose explorations of ancient and pre-modern knowledge systems is a source of personal strength and aesthetic innovation. Hilma's Ghost acts as a restorative project that uplifts these voices and makes them visible.

Sharmistha Ray is an artist, art critic, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. For two decades, their work has explored subjective experience through the lens of queerness, language, and memory. Ray's core practice consists of drawing, but also includes painting, sculpture, video installation, and photography. They have exhibited their work in solo exhibitions in Mumbai, New York, and Singapore, and shown in group exhibitions and art fairs in the U.S. and abroad. They are the recipient of a Joan Mitchell MFA Grant, and received their MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. Currently, they teach in the MFA programs at Parsons School of Design and School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dannielle Tegeder is an artist and professor at The City University of New York at Lehman College. For the past fifteen years, her work has explored abstraction through the lens of systems, architecture, and utopianism. While the core of her practice is paintings and drawings, she also works in large-scale installation, mobiles, video, sound, and animation and has done a number of collaborations with composers, dancers, and writers. In March 2020 Tegeder founded The Pandemic Salon, a community-centric project intended to dismantle the hierarchical structures of institutional discussion, which showcases topics related to the pandemic by bringing together creative minds in an informal, online environment that has connected over 600 participants from 40 countries."

Selections from the Artist’s Library Curated by Hilma’s Ghost

Bashkoff, Tracey, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, (Guggenheim, 2018) Besant, Annie and Leadbeater, C.W., Thought Forms, (Sacred Bones Books, 2020) Cassel, Anna, The Saga of the Rose, (Bokförlaget Stolpe, 2023) Duncan, Michael, Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, (DelMonico Books, 2021) Elizabeth, S., The Art of The Occult: A Visual Sourcebook for the Modern Mystic, (White Lion Publishing, 2020) Gabriel, Mary, Ninth Street Women, (Back Bay Books, 2018) Hale, Amy, Sex Magic: Diagrams of Love, Ithell Colquhoun, (Palgrave Macmillian, 2022) Hessel, Katy, The Story of Art Without Men, (Norton Press, 2023) Higgie, Jennifer, The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World, (Pegasus Books, 2024) Hundley, Jessica, Plant Magick: The Library of Esoterica, (Taschen, 2022) Hundley, Jessica, and Grossman, Pam, Witchcraft: The Library of Esoterica, (Taschen, 2021) Kandinsky, Wassily, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, (Echo Point Books & Media, 2020) Lipp, Deborah, The Way of Four, (Crossed Crow Books, 2023) Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, (Abbeville Press, 1986) Nochlin, Linda, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (Thames & Hudson, 1971)

Otto, Elizabeth, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queen Identities, and Radical Politics, (The MIT Press, 2019) Ronnberg, Ami, and Martin, Kathleen, The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images, (Taschen, 2020) Rubinstein, Raphael, and Bause Rubinstein, Heather, Schema: World as Diagram, (Marlborough Press, 2023) Sutcliff, Jamie, Magic: Documents of Contemporary Art, (Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press, 2021) Valiente, Doreen, The Rebirth of Witchcraft, (Crowood Press, 1989) Voss, Julia, Hilma af Klint: A Biography, (The University of Chicago Press, 2022)

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