Knowledge as Alchemy

Amanita is pleased to present Knowledge as Alchemy, Craig Boagey’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Craig Boagey (b. 1985, Liverpool, UK) is a contemporary artist who predominantly works in the form of painting and drawing. Combining various paint mediums, Boagey’s creative preoccupations revolve around enticing, succulent, fleshy, sometimes erotic, occasionally perverse subject matter. Often using nature, in particular mushrooms, as a vehicle or device, Boagey sorts to discuss and examine human behavior and our social interrelations with each other and the world around us. The paintings are laboriously executed with a precise virtuosity, often referencing theology, mythology, poetry and the occult. Essentially, Boagey’s work aims to discuss, dissect and question humanity’s cognitive relationship with the earth, technology, and itself.

Boagey currently resides in London, United Kingdom. He received his BA in 2008 from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts.

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An antonym for enlightenment is benightedness, a term which can also refer to being overtaken by darkness. What world of sci-non-fi would we inhabit had the Tower of Babel never been erected, thus avoiding the blanket of deceleration cast over humanity’s progress? “Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other,” Genesis 11:7. Alongside such fragmentation however, blooms a fervent belief: in the mysterious, the esoteric.. spurred by the vacuums left by ignorance. Fast forward to present, where fragmentation thrives under the guise of misinformation and opaque algorithms. A chilling future looms, shadowed by the burgeoning universal language of data collection—secretive, narrowly shared, divinely omnipotent. Will this new lexicon evolve into a technological panopticon, or will it be our salvation? Engagement is prioritized over truth. Fortunately however , this Information Age is brimming with solutions and possibilities for the future.

Craig Boagey’s exhibition, Knowledge As Alchemy, poses a series of questions and check-ins concerning the direction in which we are heading; the mystically-shaped holes in the fabric of history that took us here; how preemptive we were in our fictions and mythology, etc.. Whilst simultaneously photographic and idiosyncratically painterly, Boagey’s paintings appear to have taken an ambiguous leap ahead of us on our timeline, yet landed somewhere uncannily familiar. “Man has always been half-daemon, half-Daedalus, driven by gods and dreams, but making with his hands the human image of his desire.”

– Attribution unknown

Human ingenuity is always in tension with the danger of unintended consequences. In I have no mouth, and I must scream, the title floats above a luminously backlit man kissing the bottom of a nude woman, as seen through the heart-shaped opening of a cave below them. The title references the eponymous short story by Harlan Ellison, which is set in a post WWIII hellscape where a super computer has killed all but five individuals, only to vengefully torture them. What does desire look like, and can it be controlled? Why might these paintings be funny? In Zero Death, Eternal You, the text sandwiches a hermetic diagram by Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). It was used as the cover for his book, The Seal of Seals, an elaboration on Bruno’s theories on the human mind and its extraordinary powers.

The flippancy of our online content economy has created the ultimate gallimaufry. It has become normalized for streams of information to be randomly sequenced, and our reactions and emotions to become suffocated as the bits of information pass through the digestive tracts of our brains. Footage of a politician misbehaving twenty years ago might be followed by a video cautioning the morbid dangers of paper receipts, which in turn could be swiped away to see a cat gagging at the smell of a shrimp. And some or all of it may be fake. Language is often used to ground these images and videos, providing context to this inundation of visual material. By captioning the found images that Boagey chooses to paint with sci-fi or arcana-laden language, he is inviting us to join him in questioning, perceiving and heeding what the horizon looks like.

– Adrian Schachter