Madame X: Theatre of Experience
In the mid-1970s, in an abandoned chicken ranch outside of El Cajon, California, Madam X was seized by numerous visitations. She was given insights into abstract theories on eternal culture, eternal beings, and relational aesthetics. The experience revealed itself to her through the language of the body, sensations which compelled her to trace ecstatic hoops, loops, and swirls on paper. She recognized acutely at the time that these were instructions from another place. For three years, these directives flowed into her, eventually evolving into an extensive taxonomy and visual language. Shortly thereafter, the possession began to fade, leaving Madam X permanently altered and indebted to this sudden education.
For the last forty years, Madam X has developed an emergent practice of exploring her comprehension and integration of that psychic experience. This will be her third exhibition since the work began to manifest physically.
Theatre of Experience, a display of nine framed works at House of Seiko, focuses on Madam X's mandala drawings developed over the last fifteen years. Many of these paintings and drawings posit themselves as evolving works. They are records of the experience of her spiritual insights and were created solely for her pursuit of spiritual understanding. They contain intricately layered yet familiar images of humans, creatures, and other living things weaving through the sphere of time, attempting to return to the center of the world in which they have been born.
