Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

In Samadhi Jordan Belson attempts to portray a visual phenomenon he perceived while in a meditative state. A follower of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism, Belson lived and maitained a strict Yogic practice and a largely ascetic and solitary life in San Francisco in the two years leading up to the film's creation. He rendered his experience in a color palette inspired by natural elements and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, accompanied by an electronic score punctuated by sounds of his inhaling and exhaling.

Although Wally Hedrick appropriated the central diagram of HERMETIC IMAGE from a sixteenth-century alchemical book, when asked about the painting's religious connotations, he asserted that there were none: "the image was what interested me." In divorcing the figure from its magical origins, he created an image that engages with a Pop Art sensibility, in which the schematic becomes a formal, graphic exercise. Hedrick's work exemplifies the San Francisco countercultural proclivity for using mystical themes and non-Western systems of belief to launch an assault on rational thought.

In Retreat Oscar Howe pictured a swirling sky and a body in motion through geometric forms and quilt-like motifs, as if the viewer were caught directly within the action of a traditional Dakota ceremony. By offering a first-person point of view, Howe countered the more ethnographic approach favored in colonial depictions of indigenous life, as well as the market pressures Native American artists faced to represent stylized visions of Native experience. The combination of representation and abstraction in this work reflects Howe's staunch advocacy for artistic self-determination and his desire to expand the visual language of Native modernism.

As he moved away from h is previous minimal and depersonalized practice, Carlos Villa conceived of a cross-culture art history, one based not on the Western canon but on his own Filipino ancesty, the functional and ceremonial objects of pan-Oceanic cultures, and contemporary art objects. This process served a ritualistic, healing purpose for Villa, as he would explain: "I felt I was connecting with art, not just the painting dialogue, not just the sculpture dialogue, not just the modernist dialogue. But a dialogue with my own universe, or, what I saw the universe to be."

In Betye Saar's Ten Mojo Secrets, recognizable imagery, such as stars, moons, and suns, appears alongside abstracted photographs and scavenged bric-a-brac. The result is intentionally enigmatic: works from Saar's Mojo series contain "secret information," she has explained that "radiate[s] something that makes you uneasy." Combining found objects with symbols from astrology, palmistry, and tarot, the altar-like sculptures she created during this period evoke ideas of ritual, magic, and healing in both their accumulative forms and processes of making.

A Catholic nun turned full-time artist, Barbar Rossi was intimately familiar with the visual language of religious iconography. In Male of Sorrows #5, she reinterprets the archetype of the Man of Sorrows—an iconic Christian devotional image that depicts the wounded body of Christ. Her graphic style took inspiration from both the bold linework of late medieval German woodcuts and the fantastical and, at times, humorous work of her artistic contemporaries in Chicago. Her absurd appropriation of this conventionally sobering icon of piety reflected larger culture shifts away from the dictates of the Catholic Church and organized religion more broadly.