Exhibitions
XX PERFECT SOULS
Bad Water / 320 E. Churchwell Ave. Knoxville April 1, 2022 - May 6, 2022
Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Milano Chow, Jenni Crain, Kristin Dickson- Okuda, Rubens Ghenov, Ann Gillen, KB Jones, Michael Kennedy Costa, Sean Macalister, Sarah McMenimen, J. Parker Valentine, Anna Rosen
And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make.
“The End” John Lennon and Paul McCartney
XX Perfect Souls is an exhibition by XX artists presenting themselves for themselves and for others. This is the nature of the self portraits in XX Perfect Souls.
XX Perfect Souls maintain their perfection by sharing themselves. XX Perfect Souls share themselves as a way to mirror the perfection of the other. XX Perfect Souls share with, for, and to each other so that we all might be seen more and shared more by each other. XX Perfect Souls Are Never Alone.
This is a movement of love within oneself that moves out into the collective and back again. That movement is presented for you here at Bad Water in XX Perfect Souls.
Like all capitalist constructions, the notion of self care must be vanquished and replaced with its rightful and righteous precedent : self love.
XX Perfect Souls love themselves and see life as a living dream. For XX Perfect Souls there is no distinction between the sleeping world of darkness and dreams and the waking world of light and dreams. In traditional Jungian dream analysis, we must consider every dreamt woman to be the feminine in us, every man to be the masculine in us. We double ourselves to see both our shadow and our perfection, our complete and utter wholeness.
In a lecture given to a crowd of delighted listeners in the great state of a California in the year 1990, Terence McKenna, the great prophet of plant medicines of all forms, declared his program for the artist:
"Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind. Anything less is a dithering when Rome burns."
It is quite a statement, but he doesn't stop there. In that same talk, McKenna also says that our consciousness is so great and so vast that a single mind cannot contain it.
It cannot be contained.
This is the simple fact.
If you can be your consciousness and see your consciousness, you don’t need to really say or do much more than that.
This is the other simple fact of the work presented by XX Perfect Souls.
The work is all here.
We have a moral obligation to speak of this love inside us, to share it and spread it and hold it up as truth, as artists, as friends, and as human beings. If we fulfill this obligation, we will continue to live as XX Perfect Souls.
