The Mystical, The Esoteric, & The Magical at Kolaj Fest New Orleans

SYMPOSIUM AT KOLAJ FEST NEW ORLEANS 2023

The Mystical, The Esoteric, & The Magical 

with Josiah Gagosian, LaVonna Varnado Brown, and Ric Kasini Kadour

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Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 7-11 June 2023. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.

“Art, like magic, is the science of engineering shapes, symbols, texture, and emotion to achieve a change in consciousness,” writes Louisiana collagist LaVonna Varnado Brown. On this panel, artists will speak about how their work is in dialogue with the mystical, the esoteric, and the magical

Inspired from an early age by the imagery and mythology of the Nahuas, whose pictographic writing system culminated in a conceptualization of painting that was synonymous with poetry, Josiah Gagosian’s current artistic practice has become rooted in the worlds of the literary and the linguistic. Deriving metaphorical motifs from a variety of disparate cultural and religious traditions, his work is a tool for self-examination and psycho-spiritual development. His current trajectory was born out of a yearning to reconcile the complex fragments of his own unusual life and family history, placing them within a more universal historic and mythic context. He views this task as a mystical one, a divine, even futile, attempt to make work that serves as a vehicle to the other shore of human consciousness. He writes, “My work is often not readily identifiable as collage-related, but collage remains an intrinsic part of how I construct and develop a composition and it lends the work a specific visual aesthetic and style I don’t believe it would possess otherwise.”

LaVonna Varnado Brown “is currently focused on developing her visual body of work which is Afro Astro futuristic in aesthetic with odes to history and floral daydreams abounding to inspire joy, hope, resistance, and rest in mixed media collage, water color, and acrylic.” She writes, “Afro Futurism’s alchemizing power is in its ability to collapse time and space to make room to explore the width, depth, and breath of the sea of abundance at rest between Earth and sky. Whose work is paid? Whose work is visible? Whose work is valid? Dignified? Acknowledged? Is care work invisibilized because it is feminized? Is your perception of all these things a result of being socialized in a cis-hetero-patriarchal society that centers whiteness?” She will speak about how she “employs symbols like circles, celestial bodies, and crystals to incite divine feminine vibrational energy and inspire transformation.”

Brown and Gagosian will be joined by Ric Kasini Kadour who will speak about magic in New Orleans and how Kolaj institute’s Collage & Folklore Project is interpreting ideas about magic, fairies, and witches for a 21st century audience. 

Kolaj Fest New Orleans is a multi-day festival and symposium about contemporary collage and its role in art, culture, and society, 7-11 June 2023. Visit the website to learn more, see an overview of the program, and register to attend.