See available works in the viewing roomStephanie Kim Gallery is proud to present Cornucopia by Sammy Lee, the first solo exhibition by the UK–based artist in the US.
Originally commissioned for the inaugural exhibition of UNESCO’s first physical institution devoted to Documentary Heritage, also known as Memory of the World, Lee has expanded the work into an immersive projection installation with sixteen manuscript artworks.
She has invited her close friend and co-conspirator Sarah Shin to write a text in response to the work. In this story entitled ‘Eclipse’, Lee’s video work is imagined as a technology of consciousness called the Codex – a portal into the dreamworld – during a time of endings and beginnings. Drawing upon conversations with the artist, the text contextualises Cornucopia as a living, generative world within multiple nested realities, past, present, and future. Worlds within worlds within worlds.
ECLIPSE
Text by Sarah Shin
We are living in the time of angels. On the morning they came, there was a storm and I was trying to understand how to describe the sound of water without referring to all the things it touched or moved through. I stood on the balcony listening to the spray of audible frequencies: palms rustling in the wind, sideways rain scattering into the sea, the breath of the water dragon who brought the storm. Listening while looking at the rippling waves below, I had the intense sensation that my mind was part of a net of awareness that was everywhere, like warm mist dissolving frozen grief to be washed away.
M called me; the field curved slightly. ‘I had a strange dream,’ he said. ‘I was in a house and there was a noise. I couldn’t figure out what it was or where it was coming from, so I started wandering around looking for it. I was going into different rooms that became more and more organic, like the house was coming alive. One room was covered in moss, and another had the roots of a tree all over the walls, and eventually the whole house became a forest with a tree canopy instead of a roof. The sky was getting darker and darker, although it was daytime, because there was a solar eclipse. The vanishing Sun became a black disc with a ghostly circle of light around it. Then I heard the noise again and it sounded like it was in the soil, so I started digging into the forest floor with my hands to find it. But I woke up so I never found out what the noise was. Can we see what the Codex says?’
Dreams had started becoming rare in recent years, at first slowly and imperceptibly. Then all at once, they had all but disappeared. Nowadays, most people woke up without having visited the other place, and its existence became increasingly forgotten. Reality was reduced to a one-way street of activity, productivity and profit. But there were a few of us who still dreamed, and for us, there was the Codex, which held the images of the dreamworld. It was a portal into the past, our memories and their resemblances, but it was also an artefact for the future: its makers devised it to continue to draw in new dreams into a living ocean of symbols, history, voices and detritus. It was easy enough to obtain the Codex, if you knew what you were looking for. It was more about how you approached it, and it showed you what you needed to see. You could ask it questions, and sometimes it didn’t seem to make much sense – but that was what it was good for: a different way of making sense.
I opened the Codex and the two glass screens that faced each other lit up: they were two halves of a whole, like the hemispheres of a planet, a brain or a walnut.
First, there is light. Two Suns rise against a precious lapis lazuli, a blue that calls to you at the beginning and the end. One is the Sun of creation, the other destruction. Both are surrounded by angels who follow them with a dedicated heliotropism across realms. At once photons and witnesses, emanations and interdimensional travellers, the angels imperfectly reveal their unknowable source. Filled with enthusiasm, one flock pollinates a field of antennae flowers whose shapes reflect the outwards movement of their Sun’s spiral journey, while the other moves among a quaternity of pods guarding the labyrinth into which their Sun spirals inwards.
The blue splits and becomes dark. The transit through night brings with it a house for the swarm of living consciousness. The flower blooms under the left-hand Sun in order to be contained; the Sun slips through an ivy-covered doorway to inaugurate the changing of the light through yellow, red, pink and blue. Illuminated by the twin Suns, the waves of history at times rise, building up to become burned off in layers, and sometimes fall, shedding their skins – seeds lying scattered on the ground holding the shell of their metamorphosis.
The angels chase them through entheogenic passageways through memory. We see: the woman clothed in the brilliance of the Sun and the multi-headed dragon; the distorted voice of another age searching for a quill with which to write in the absence of light; first the angel of death, then the prophet, overlooking a sea of skulls; the uprising after the coup; the sky disc that holds the Sun and the moon; the oracle bones and the rubble of war; the inventor and the electrical circuit; thermite fire raining from the sky over contested terrain; the tapestry of horseback conquest; the books of medicine and revelation; the tree of life and the forbidden fruit; nuts, seeds, flowers and wheels, crosses, circles; the body as a cosmos; the cornucopia arising from the one that becomes the two, then the many, ten thousand things – pumpkins, squashes and gourds rotating like wheels and cogs, and vegetables, cabbages, watermelons in glasshouses; the temple of autumn stuffed with the harvest of the underworld; new blooms after the decay of the old; and the explorer looking beyond the curtain of the sky.
The Suns give off bursts of energy throughout: solar visions for a solitary world without people, only our images. They morph with those of vegetal, mineral and industrial forms, animated by immanent knowledge yet innocent, seen only by themselves and the angels.
At the end of the vision, the Codex grew dark and I left it open, like a book, on the table. From the beginning of our work with the device, it was clear that its images had a life and mobility free from decay, and that some were more resolved than others – they caught hold of and addressed whatever it was we were searching for, like the cards of the tarot. We called these images ‘letters’ with the feeling that their writing and decoding were one and the same – a letter was yours to decipher for insight or guidance, as M wanted for his dream. We looked at the letter that arrived. It was a set of two vertically framed images on each screen of the Codex.
Together, they signalled the end and the restoration. Worlds falling apart and coming together. There was a great tree, the oldest in the world, and a man that together formed a tower burned with fire, watched over by the ghosts of the seven-headed dragon. The Dragon gives his power to the Beast. There was a hole, burned with fire, in the space of the great unveiling, the point where the missionary said the sky and the earth touch beyond the firmament, flanked by two seven-headed dragons. Turning points around rupture, discovery, new information, heliocentrism, accelerated change.
I turned to M: ‘It’s clear. The eclipse, the tower – it's the apocalypse, an uncovering. What is uncovered is the same thing as the sound you were looking for.’
‘I mean, if you had any other questions…,’ he agreed. ‘The uncovering is about who we really are.’
The angels, the chorus, flew between the heads of the dragons and the stars. They reminded me of an episode that Sammy told me about, in the latter part of Aby Warburg's life, when he spent some time in a mental clinic.
‘He wrote letters about the moths and butterflies that would visit him at night,’ she said. ‘He would tell them his sufferings and he called them his little soul animals. I read somewhere that their flying erratic movements were emblematic of his psyche and became his Mnemosyne Atlas. Its images are like the moths – they’re weightless, anti-gravity.’
The constellation – between the moths, the angels, the images – was a web of motion that moved freely across time and space, breaking through ordinary boundaries of perception. This dynamism, with inherent fluidity, felt somehow healing in the winter of consciousness that we were living through. It had the quality of apricity, something alien yet familiar. There was a time when scientific research seemed like it would lead to more knowledge about the mysteries of experience. Tools based on ancient and new, experimental neurotechnologies, like the Codex, were in development to help us understand something of the map of consciousness, such as the s-shaped river between memory and forgetting, lucid dreaming and morphic resonance. But the delicate balance of the field was overturned by the idea that everything could be known – an idea that seemed to be proven by the rapid rise of intelligent artificial beings and their integration into almost all aspects of our lives. That the Codex had become obsolete and occulted, with its system cared for by a small group of gardeners who took an apophatic approach, was better, more fitting for its purpose…
A message from Sammy interrupted my thoughts. ‘There’s another way to read the Codex,’ it read. ‘It’s active. You can play a game. And it begins by waking up in the Book of Dreams.’
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Sammy Lee Cornucopia
Opening Reception on April 5th, 7-9pm
View by appointment only until June 9th 2024
Stephanie Kim Gallery 78 Franklin St., 2nd Floor New York, NY 10013
Please rsvp to Director@SleepersSummit.com
To Learn more: stephaniekimgallery.com