FOR IMMEDIATE RELELASE

photographic works by

DESTINY TURNER

ALEXIS KARL

COURTNEY BROOKE

NAHW YG

LORENA TORRES MARTELL

with words by

KRISTEN J. SOLLEE

and an accompanying compendium of witchy vernacular photographs

from the collection of Stephen Romano gallery

MARCH 4 - APRIL 30 2021

“A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time. I am a child of the poisonous wind that copulated with the river on an oil-slick, garbage infested midnight. I turn about on my own parentage. I inoculate against those very biles that brought me to light. I am a serum born of venoms. I am the antibody of all time.”

― Ray Bradbury, Long After Midnight

link to interview

link to article

Stephen Romano Gallery and The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick are pleased to announce their next collaborative curatorial effort "TRANSMUTATIONS.. Witches, Healers and Oracles" which will present the esoteric photographic works of Destiny Turner, Alexis Karl, Courtney Brooke, Lorena Torres Martell and Nahw Yg, with words by renowned author Kristen J. Sollee.

The exhibition features artists who have channeled their life experiences into their art making practice using the languages and aesthetics of the esoteric, witchcraft, shamanism, and other contexts which imply the conjuring and manipulation of forces outside of mundane sensory perception.

The exhibition will also feature vernacular and historical photographic works, including works from our collection of vintage lobby cards, as well as the early 20th century photography of William Mortensen, Walter Bird, John Everard, Roland Henricks, among many others.

Exhibition curator Stephen Romano, a collector and dealer in outsider and esoteric art in Brooklyn New York says "The title of the exhibition "Transmutations" came in conversation with the artist Destiny Turner, who is also a poetess, and suggests the action of changing or the state of being changed into another form.. either in actual form from matriarch to witch or shaman (and back again), from darkness to light, from mundane to supernatural.. the possibilities are endless and Kristien J. Sollee's texts best compliment how that applies to the works in this exhibition. The show features artists whom I call "authentic", as they have channeled their true life experiences directly into their art making practice. These artists use the language and claim the imagery of the esoteric, witchcraft and healing to perpetuate what is to me the noblest and highest ambition an artist can have, to use art as a social healing device..  the viewer, who enters the gallery threshold seeking a cathartic experience will not be disappointed as all of the works in the exhibition whether made by these altruistic contemporary artists or the supplemental material from our collection's archives will serve as affirmations to the receptive that the way of the witch, the esoteric, the left hand path, is the most rewarding and enriching for the quality of our lives, which after all is the grand purpose of art, wouldn't you agree?"

This is the fourth exhibition Stephen Romano has curated for the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick. Previous exhibitions have included the wildly popular "William Mortensen's WITCHES", a selection from Romano's comprehensive collection of works by the artist, "Barry William Hale" the first ever solo exhibition by the world renowned Australian artist who is a member of Ordo Templi Orientis, and "Apparitions.. " which presented over 40 works from Stephen Romano's collection on the subject of ghosts, spirits and the paranormal ranging in dates of creation from the early 1600's to the present.

The exhibition will open MARCH 4 and continue through APRIL 31 2021.

This exhibition is presented by the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick and is a ticketed event. MASKS MUST BE WORN

Ticketing information may be found on the Buckland Museum's website here

PLEASE don't just show up without a reservation.

KRISTEN J. SOLLEE

"The witch is a shapeshifter.

She transforms from vixen to hag, healer to hellion, adversary to advocate based on who seeks her.

She’s Hecate, the ancient Greek goddess of the crossroads.

She’s Lilith, the blood-drinking demoness of Jewish mythology who refused to submit sexually to her husband.

She’s Baba Yaga, the Slavic hag in a chicken-legged hut who flourishes in the forest.

She’s Yamauba, the monstrous Japanese mountain crone who feasts on human flesh in her tattered kimono.

She’s Joan of Arc, the French military hero in white armor burned by her brethren for cross dressing and heresy.

She’s Marie Laveau, the powerful Voodoo Queen of nineteenth-century New Orleans.

She’s Elvira, vamping with a crucifix in her bountiful cleavage, dishing out double entendres.

She’s Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teen shot for her feminist advocacy and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

She’s the bruja at the botánica.

She’s the practitioner of granny magic, hoodoo, and conjure.

She’s the everyday intuitive, seeing and hearing things others do not.

She’s everywoman.

The witch is at once female divinity, female ferocity, and female transgression.

She is all and she is one.

The witch has as many moods and as many faces as the moon.

Most of all, she is misunderstood."

*Kristen J. Sollee From Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive (ThreeL 2017)

Kristen J. Sollée is the author of three critically-acclaimed books on the legacy of the witch: Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive; Cat Call: Reclaiming the Feral Feminine; and Witch Hunt: A Traveler’s Guide to the Power and Persecution of the Witch. A writer, curator, and educator exploring the intersections of art, gender, and the occult, Kristen has been featured on NPR and in The Guardian. She currently teaches at The New School in New York City.

DESTINY TURNER

Destiny Turner is a multi media artist from Alabama, presently living in Ohio. Her works have recently been featured in Lexiconmag, BlackFlowers Online and an in depth profile was published in White Hot Contemporary, one of the leading online publications of contemporary art.

In January 2021 Vittoria Benzine wrote of Destiny Turner ".. This improvisational approach, paired with Turner’s harrowing emotional depth, yields results that plunge viewers into a tangle of synapses. The rawness .. in Turner’s work arises from schisms within the artist herself. Turner is at once youthful and weathered, with a radiant energy and soft speaking voice that counter-intuitively conveys world weariness. When she works with paint, the frenetic patterns betray a fight with herself — the viewer is merely a voyeur."

When asked recently by Melolagnia what the common themes that string her work together she responded "..The cycle of death and rebirth that we go through, and shadow work, something that's just ever present in my thoughts.."

From the artist:

"come with me 

look through the hazy lens of the abyss 

where life and death softly kiss "

ALEXIS KARL

Alexis Karl is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist living and working in NYC. Karl is currently a professor of installation and multidisciplinary art at Pratt Institute, and a regular lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum and National Arts Club on the relevance fashion, fragrance and film on modern and historical artistic culture.

Her films, installations and live performances have been featured in festivals and exhibitions around the world, most notably the Whitney Museum of Art, The Guggenheim Museum, Stephen Romano Gallery, The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, The Morbid Anatomy Museum, Scope Art Fair, Katra Film Festival, Los Angeles Fashion Festival, Bowery Film Festival. Karl has won acclaim at film festivals internationally and nationally, and her film and multidisciplinary work has been featured in New York Times: Women in The World, NY Post, Elysian Magazine, Gothic Beauty Magazine, Heathen Harvest, Honeysuckle Magazine, London Financial Times, Atlas Obscura, Bustle Magazine; with TV and Radio spots on Salford City Radio UK, WMBR Bat's In The Belfry Radio Boston, CNN and The View.

From the artist:

"My film Oracle is a spell. 

Every one of the Oracle’s movements is a moment of magic;  A step upon the verdant ground, a glance into the scrying bowl filled with rain water, an incantation tumbling from her lips and spirited away on swells of music.  Each of these moments, the Oracle harnesses the elements, calling forth visions of an uncertain future. Her growing fury demands the rewriting of the world, and we leave her there-a daughter of the dusk, cloaked in the spells of rituals past."

COURTNEY BROOKE

Courtney Brooke (1980, New England, United States) is a photographer and conceptual artist. She explores the ties of the feminine to nature and spirituality through the lens of nostalgia. Moments are depicted that only exist to punctuate human drama and clarify our cosmic existence, while finding the poetic meaning in everyday life.

Artist Statement:

"My work explores the relationship between the feminine, the natural world and spirituality.

With influences such as witchcraft, the romantics, mother earth and death, I am exploring what it is to exist in a human form.

Ever since I was an adolescent I have been fascinated by the unrelenting pressure of time and it’s relationship to beauty. What starts out as yearning soon becomes manipulated into a tragedy of temptation, leaving only a sense of nihilism and the prospect of a new beginning.

I strive to create a visual moment that urges the viewer to question spirituality, the human experience and one's own connection to the universe."

NAHW YG

Excepted from ""Front line Nurse Nahw Yg’s Cathartic Photographs In The Time Of The Covid Pandemic." by Stephen Romano on Bored Panda November 2020:

Nahw Yg is an Autodidact. (An autodidact ( ancient Greek αὐτός autos ‘self’ and διδάσκειν didaskein ‘teach’) is a person who independently acquires knowledge or skills or has acquired them through observation, experiments, practice or reading. A directed auto didactic learning process is also referred to as self-study , in contrast to formalized study at a university*). She didn’t go to any art school or apprentice with a professional. Instead, she attended medical school at 17 years old, and began to work in the field at 19. According to her, she “did many stages in psychiatry and disabled people, my “specialty” .. she developed a private practice as a Craniosacral therapy**. She says “I have been working in hospital for 10 years and then quit it to explore other sides of caring. Recently i came to hospital as volunteer during the Covid phase..”

Nahw Yg says she began photography 8 years ago.. When asked about what inspired her to pick up a camera her reply is about as beautiful and sublime as her photographs themselves.. “Inner Emotions and feelings led me to begin photography. It was almost metaphysical, to express through the body the hardly expressible, the intangible / invisible. I create like i smile or cry, an impulse’.

From the artist:

"My practice of photography is instinctive. I try to give shape to the invisible, to my inner feelings. To All those questioning what we hold as the human beings we are. More particularly as a woman.

In the beginning, i think they were egotistical and therapeutic self-portraits . Over the time, i adopted a more universal feminine language, more structured and deeply rooted with my embodiment of the "animal woman" archetype, connected with nature and feelings, free and claiming."

LORENA TORRES MARTELL

Lorena Torres Martell is an artist who resides in San Luis Potosí, México.
She has participated in various exhibitions of painting, engraving and photography. She collaborated with photo work in the storybook "SINIESTRO" by Violeta García, at the Fóbica festival in Guadalajara and at the Centro Cultural de México Contemporáneo in Mexico City.

In 2018 she held his first individual photography exhibition "EXCISION" at the La casa de las Bóvedas Cultural Center

She recently won first place in the festival's horror photography contest: Terrorificamente Cortos, in Palencia, Spain with his photography "Tres Brujas". She was also awarded the instagram prize of the same contest.

from the artist:

"My main inspiration is horror movies, gothic culture and the aesthetics of the grotesque, I am passionate about creating these types of images, I can spend hours in post production, I really enjoy creating characters with deformed features that reflect despair and suffering, witches, monsters and supernatural beings. The terrifying, the strange, the fear and death."

VERNACULAR AND ANONYMOUS WORKS

VINTAGE SNAPSHOTS "BOY WITCH" CIRCA 1940'S

INTERNATIONAL NEWS PHOTOS - "DEVOTEE OF A WITCHCRAFT CULT IN BRAZIL" 1956

WALTER BIRD "DEVIL DANCER" photogravure 1930