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.

Christopher Paul (b. Bulverde, TX, 1996) is a Houston-based artist whose work investigates speculative states of transcendence, informed by their mixed Gullah Geechee/Korean heritage and Queer identity. Drawing from Jayna Brown’s Black speculative thought and spiritual lineages including Hoodoo and Buddhism, Paul’s practice questions the “Human” as a fixed category, instead imagining subjectivities that exist beyond space, time, and corporeality.

Working across performance, sound, collage, and sculpture, Paul creates site-specific installations functioning as vehicular shrines or energy vessels. Activated through endurance and time-based actions, these works highlight the relationships between stillness, movement, and physical detachment, encouraging states of ecstatic clarity.

Themes of spiritual distortion, transmigration, and radical rapture form the core of their inquiry, positioning their work at the intersection of exaltation and critique.

Images from left: Great was the Ecstasy III, Copper speaker wire, 2025; Headshot of Christopher Paul in studio. Images provided by the artist.