It is Expatriot Awareness Month at Picture Farm, and we are keen to put our arms around our family-less friends, drinking some wine, talking some talk and generally enjoy the company of smart, engaged, stupid and out-to-lunch people. Friday the 29th we’ll be doing just that in our gallery space, opening our doors for a Turkey Day After Party Round Table Get together of warm, welcoming proportions.

Andrew Rawlinson was a war baby (b.1943) and lived in 17 different places by the time he was six.
He got hit early on: Elvis, Jelly Roll Morton, Samuel Johnson, John Keats, Jack Kerouac, Cezanne, Pollock. And Zeus.
He added philosophy and Indian traditions to rock’n’roll, jazz and literature. He was a scholar at Cambridge and did a Ph.D on the Lotus Sutra at the University of Lancaster. He taught Buddhism for 20 years and put on a course on Altered States of Consciousness at Berkeley and Santa Barbara. His forerunning book on Western teachers in Eastern traditions has been hailed as “fascinating, opinionated, and ambitious book is suitable for any library.”
Tonight he’ll be speaking about his forthcoming book “The Hit : Into the Rock ‘n Roll Universe and Beyond” covering the esoteric side of musicianship, spirituality and accepting the hits.
An excerpt:
“I remember Eric Clapton talking about how, at the age of 15 or so, he was listening to Family Favourites on the radio. Suddenly – and it always happens suddenly – came the first riffs of a Chuck Berry song. ‘It just did me in – pinned me against the wall.’
He’d discovered rock’n’roll. He’d been hit. And like everyone who’s been hit, he entered a world: the rock’n’roll universe. Not just a blessing but an ordeal, not just a discovery but a derangement. Reality is itself the ultimate show. That’s the hit. And the world it throws you into? You’re in it right now.”
He joins us straight off the plane from the sought of France where he lives with his wife, his companion of 46 years of whom his bio admits, “when he lies next to his wife, he knows there’s nothing else.”

Linda Zimmermann brings a sense of exploration to State Of Wonder. Exploring form and exploring repurposing and recycling has been part of her repertoire of one-of-a-kind cashmere design. Recently she’s taken the same sensibility to collage works, having contributed to the Guati Card Box at the Guggenheim’s “Splendid Playground” exhibit.

Inspired by nature, history, art (fine, folk, & outsider) and informed by her Midwestern roots, Linda Zimmermann has been making things from found materials since as long as she can remember. In addition to her collage work she is a self-taught seamstress, has studied photography at The New School and poetry at Hunter College. Her work has been in shops and galleries across the country. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Cynthia Rojas creates paintings, illustrations and printed matter of all sorts using a signature line-drawn and heavy shapes to build light, seductively designed compositions. She will be presenting to editions of plates and other prints for consumption…

Cynthia Rojas is a New York based artist with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been part of group and solo exhibits in California, North Carolina, New York, Japan and Spain. Her drawings can be currently seen in the Pierogi FlatFiles in Brooklyn, NY.

Painter, writer and illustrator Sara Woster brings her gorgeously vibrant vision to PF Gallery as part of the SOW show. She was recently interviewed by the Children’s Brook review regarding her series of beautifully crafted books called “The City and Country.” Her work for the upcoming SOW show entitled “All Stars of the Electric Horizons” are screen prints on archival Dur-O-Tone paper overlaid with mixed media, collage and ink.

Sara Woster was born and raised in South Dakota. She studied painting at the University of Minnesota before moving to New York City. She has exhibited her paintings and animation internationally and has written collaborative multimedia performances that have been performed at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Franklin Art Works in Minneapolis. A set of eight early reader books illustrated by Sara was released by Home Grown Books in 2013. Sara also received a degree in creative writing from The New School in New York and has had several non-fiction essays included in popular anthologies including The May Queen and Because I Love Her. Sara divides her time between Brooklyn and Northern Minnesota where she and her family live in a cabin so deep in the woods that she is glad she never saw The Blair Witch Project.

Dr. Andrew Rawlinson, eminent historian of religion, will be delivering a talk on Saturday, November 9th at 5PM at PF Gallery as part of the State Of Wonder show. Pulling from a youth of rock ‘n roll spent with among others, with Syd Barrett and Strom Thorgerson, he has written the book “The Hit : Into the Rock ‘n Roll Universe and Beyond.”

The Amazon Review of a previous book “Book of Enlightened Masters : Western Teachers in Eastern” reads:
“Professor and religious historian Andrew Rawlinson has done a monumental service. With an effulgent wit and a critical eye he tells the stories of virtually all the teachers, East and West, who have had an impact on establishing Eastern religious traditions in the West. Three branches of Buddhism, two lineages of Sufism, and innumerable Hindu and independent teachers are all fully represented–from Swami Vivekananda to Alan Watts, Madame Blavatsky to Idries Shah, Ruth Fuller Sasaki to Pema Chodron. A 200-year time line, charts of lineages, and tables of significant groupings supplement Rawlinson’s biographies to great effect. He details historical links and tangential relationships while deftly narrating controversies without taking sides. Find your own master in this guide to spiritual leaders.”

Among other observations in “Enlightened Masters”, Dr. Rawlinson lays out the following model in which he places teachers, their teachings, practices, lineages and so on within four general categories:
“Hot is that which is other than oneself; that which has its own life, it is not something that one has access to as of right. It is powerful and breath-taking, and is associated with revelation and grace. It is very similar to Otto’s numinous.

Cool is the very essence of oneself; one need not go to another to find it. Hence one does have access to it as of right. It is quiet and still, and is associated with self-realization.
The meaning of Structured is that there is an inherent order in the cosmos and therefore in the human conditions. There is something to be discovered and there is a way of discovering it. A map is required to find the destination.”

By contrast, Unstructured teachings say that there is no gap between the starting point and the finishing post. Method and goal are identical. We are not separate from reality/truth/God and so no map is required. Everything is available now and always has been.”

Rob Fischer: Artist Portrait from kbest productions on Vimeo.

Rob will be presenting his “Deer Portraits” series for the State of Wonder Show.
2013, 44 x 37 inches, 53 images (4×6″ each) mounted in grids on foam core
board in the order they were taken.
Shot by “trail camera” which is often used by hunters to see what
animals are in an area.The camera is mounted on a tree and has
a motion sensor that triggers the camera. Because it is set to have
a delay after sensing motion, the deer often will be half way out of frame
by the time the camera snaps the shot and the results are often humorous.
This is a series that was started a couple of years ago and will be continued.

“The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is known for presenting exciting new works from emerging and mid-career artists through the Hammer Projects program. Currently on view at the museum are new works by Brooklyn-based artist Rob Fischer. Utilizing materials that are deeply embedded with a sense of social history through their once utilitarian function, Fischer recontextualizes the materials to create new meaning and form. For the museum, the artist removed a wooden floorboard from a gymnasium that belonged to a neglected school in Minnesota. The artist reformed the floor to create a large labyrinth-like sculpture that stretches around the walls and floor of the Hammer’s lobby. As the Hammer has stated, the artist is “inspired by the American mythology of the road trip, rooted in notions of freedom and self-discovery, as well as the thousands of miles of interstate highways that connect our cities and small towns,the overlapping and intersecting floorboards are like a map of a fantastical roadway.”
Fischer was born in Minneapolis and is a graduate of Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1993). The artist has completed a number of international museum and gallery exhibitions including solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Cohan and Leslie in New York City and Mary Goldman Gallery in Los Angeles.”
-Seth Curcio for Daily Serving on Rob’s 2010 show in L.A.

Yuri Shimojo, Artist + Author :: AXIS from friendswelove.com on Vimeo.

Today, Yuri will start painting a mural inside the PF Gallery foyer for the upcoming show.
Stop by to peek at the progress if you’re in the neighborhood.

In February 2014, Picture Farm will be holding it’s inaugural film festival. Click here for details on how to submit your film.