The Wizard's Room - SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2021

The Wizard’s Room - A Meeting Place of Imagination and Ignorance.
Hamlet tells Horatio” “There are more things in Heaven and earth.../Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (I.V.166-67), bringing focus to the ever present battle between logic and emotion while dwelling within the Great Chain of Being, which places man on a hierarchy not too distant to God, inflating man’s importance, but also reducing as the natural world is just one rung below man. Added to this is the idea of the human condition, in that our mortality has always been a certainty, but also that which we strive to ensure - and it is through the need for survival that rank and status, class and race come into play, because those at the highest have the most - thus prolonging their survival, while those at the bottom have the least - ensuring their demise.
2020 brought all of this to the foreground, a reality that many of us had hoped was not still the practice, that the serfs of the Middle Ages had remained and had been cemented into society through class and race. Sure, we all knew there was rampant inequality in housing and job markets, we knew policing can get out of hand, we knew many are uninsured - what we didn’t know was we could all watch, shake our heads in dismay all the while absolving ourselves from a collective inaction that lead to riots, deaths, children being separated from parents and more, from absolving us all from a collective culpability of inaction.
We were lead by leaders and extremists that turned our nightmares into playgrounds of misinformation, superstition and placed survival into politics - sadly so very like what happened in the Dark and Middle Ages where then at least they did not have the knowledge, and the scientific understanding that we have in this new and current century. Riots were rampant, attacks on government buildings, attempted coups - all again as most of us sat at home, watched and shook our heads.
Today we have a vaccine that instead of being welcomed is overflowing with implications of conspiracy, masks are off, some were never worn simply because ‘my’ rights are more important than yours. We are witnessing again and again more and more mass shootings and fear has become our new companion - and trust has left the planet - again bringing us back societies Machiavellian in composition where fear, distrust, and self preservation rule. Choosing ignorance over reality, making emotion the ruler and ousting logic has become our reality.
The Wizard’s Room looks to how superstition and ignorance rule by creating a space where the wizard, the maker of magic, the alchemist, the seer draws us into his realm with revelations as to how we can survive, how we can prosper, who not to trust: insight to beat the system.