Hi-Dose

The Pit is pleased to present Hi-Dose, a group exhibition organized in collaboration with artists Tamara Gonzales and Roxanne Jackson. The exhibition includes 30 artists working across multiple disciplines.

~ Sprung from the forehead of Athena (and Tamara Gonzales and Roxanne Jackson) ~

“Get strong with bare feet on the ground and with everything that is born from it. Get smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with the eye of your forehead...always remember: you are the medicine.” María Sabina, Mazatec curandera and poet from Oaxaca, Mexico (1894-1985)

Hi-Dose is an exhibition of psychonauts, witches, and dreamers — artists who vigorously explore the depth of human realities through paint, clay, textiles, crystals, wax, wood, feathers, photography and glitter. With various practices embracing craft, surrealism, abstraction and maximalism, the selected artworks may function as screenshots into portals and hallucinations, glimpses of transcendence and profound changes in perception. In a world obsessed with social media, on the brink of a climate apocalypse and continually overwhelmed by the tragedies of war, these artists go inward. Like the monkey who ate the magic mushroom, heightening human senses and hastening human evolution — we are reminded of the earliest tools that can teach us new truths and lead us into a new way of being.

Popular culture’s palpable embrace of the mind-expanding movement has also piqued our interest. Beginning with Michael Pollan’s #1 New York Times best-selling book, How To Change Your Mind, to the more recent Netflix series, Nine Perfect Strangers, to the trends of style icons such as Marc Jacobs, bringing fashion fungi to the runway, to memes of Garfield taking LSD, we welcome in this new zeitgeist with open arms and open chakras.

- Roxanne Jackson

We are the medicine. Let that sit for a minute. Returning to the idea of dosages and the difference of a medicine and a poison residing in the balance of side effects, good vs bad, I’d like to explore the role of humanity in the evolution of consciousness on this planet. Where do we view ourselves in the larger cosmic picture? Are we the medicine here, or the poison? I concur with the idea that the universe is artful. It is artistic. A work of art. My psychedelic experiences reinforce the idea of a cosmic order that unfolds in spirals, fractals, and waves. Ingesting certain plants gives me extra sensory experiences. Human brains seem to have evolved to readily make use of these molecules: a super charged glimpse of possibilities, reminiscent of childhood.

Art also has the ability to heighten our senses and perceptions, and I hope to broadcast to anyone listening (ourselves included) that we are capable of making as much beauty in the world as destruction. Sometimes the culture needs a return to order, sometimes an expansion towards chaos. Sometimes both simultaneously. I know of no way we can as a species sustain this universe unless we become the medicine. Let’s leave behind some flowers, let’s leave behind some songs.

- Tamara Gonzales