As you enter Andrew Edlin Gallery in Tribeca, Paulina Peavey’s jewel-like visions command your attention. Gleaming against cobalt-blue walls, their vivid, almost embryonic folds hold droplets, petals, and eyes, while reds, blues, and yellows overlap like stained glass. Peavey attributed her work to Lacamo, a nonbinary spirit who began communicating with her in the 1930s, envisioning that humanity was evolving toward “one-gender perfection.”
This work is featured in Conduits of the Unseen: Women Artists Imagine Other Worlds, an exhibition that brings together 17 women artists whose work emerges through spirit communication. Amid the growing popularity of occult-themed exhibitions, this one stands out by asking what esoteric art can make possible, foregrounding its power to challenge entrenched social hierarchies.
In a lecture on the exhibition, curator Susan Aberth connects Peavey’s work to a pattern she saw with all of the artists in the exhibition: “Their messages are specifically meant to better the world. And how do you better the world? All of the spirits say, ‘Get rid of patriarchy.’”
André Breton appropriated the Surrealist concept of “psychic automatism” — an art practice wherein the artist suppresses conscious control to allow their unconscious thoughts to run free — from mediums. But as Aberth explains, “He took it directly from spiritualist women, but he purged the metaphysical content completely from it,” recasting their practices as expressions of the individual psyche.