dublab co-hosts with Label Curatorial and Beyond Baroque an opening party of the exhibition Paulina Peavy An Etherian Channeler at Beyond Baroque’s Mike Kelley Gallery June 5th, 2021 at 681 Venice Blvd between 4-8pm.

Paulina Peavy (1901-1999) was active in Los Angeles and San Pedro in the 1920s -1930s having a gallery and salon where she showed her work as well as art by the Synchromists, now considered the pioneers of California’s Light and Space Movement. Influenced by the occult milieu of many of these early California artists, she became a Spiritualist and began channeling discarnate entities in the early 1930s. In the tradition of Hilma Af Klint and Ethel Le Rossignol, Peavy’s discarnate entity named Lacamo guided her hand and often co-signed with the artist. Peavy’s spirit guide claimed to have arrived on a UFO ship and divulged a cosmology that echoed ancient hermetic scriptures and foretold of a Utopian future where gender would dissolve.

The exhibition features oil paintings which Peavy began as early as the 1930s as well as highly geometric works she completed in the 1980s. The show also includes the masks Peavy created and which she wore each time she channelled Lacamo and other entities. The Beyond Baroque theater will present a loop of rare films she made that illustrate her oeuvre and its inherent astroculture cosmology. A collection of books from the little known White Star Space Center of the Joshua Tree will also be premiered from the collection of Bob Fisher, as well as early Peavy ephemera recently located by research director Narin Dickerson. Opening night DJ is Greg Wooten who will be playing rare astroculture, experimental electronic, minimal, and outsider art recordings with special selections from Peavy’s narrated philosophies made by the curator. Beyond Baroque is currently the subject of the Huntington and Hammer Museums’ Made in LA focusing on its seminal punk era poetry and performances in the 1980s.