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Art on a Higher Frequency (Art In America review)
There's scant evidence of her work before that fateful séance, during which Peavy claimed to have encountered an amorphous collective being from the future, or, as she termed it, a UFO, named Lacamo. For the next fifty years, until her death in 1999, at age ninety-eight, she fe... more >> What might Paulina Peavy’s art have looked like if she hadn’t attended a séance led by the spiritualist pastor Ida Ewing in Santa Ana, California, in 1932? A recent divorcée with two children, she had taken classes at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and was teaching art in local public schools.
There's scant evidence of her work before that fateful séance, during which Peavy claimed to have encountered an amorphous collective being from the future, or, as she termed it, a UFO, named Lacamo. For the next fifty years, until her death in 1999, at age ninety-eight, she felt impelled to create artworks that explored in visual terms Lacamo's revelations. Andrew Edlin displayed a handful of these works in 2016, but the recent show-curated by Bill Arning and featuring nearly thirty paintings; six beaded and bejeweled masks, which Peavy wore while in the creative trance state; and her 1985 short film The Artist Behind the Mask-was much more extensive. The exhibition also credited Lacamo as a collaborator of Peavy's, whereas the former one barely mentioned this driving force of her work at all. It's an interesting development that can be seen in light of the fresh attention being given to artists, such as Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton, who used various forms of spiritualism to guide their work.
