Opening Reception Christopher Paul: Temporal Estrangement: A Path to No Place

Lawndale Art & Performance Center will present work by 2024/2025 Artist Studio Program participant Christopher Paul in the John M. O’Quinn gallery.

Disidentification is the method, ecstasy is the vehicle, and temporal estrangement is the arrival.

Temporal Estrangement: A Path to No Place will welcome visitors into speculative spaces and transcendental realms that Paul explores in self-portrait collages, framed within the traditions of Mahayana and Theravada Buddhist art, alongside Black queer Southern dance performance (J-Setting), and Afrofuturist soundscapes. Paul positions these self-portrait collages as meditative tools, akin to Tibetan thangkas and Korean t’aenghwas, in which figures resist any fixed identity. Paul’s installation, utilizing projection mapping, video, sound, works on paper and textile will serve as a gateway to no-place, a place that is neither here nor there, a place beyond all human experience, an ecstatic realm where the temporal is undone, and the self is dissolved into the cosmic unknown.