Empty Gallery is pleased to introduce The Room of Spirit and Time. Situated in an independent chamber to the left of the gallery’s entrance foyer, TRST is an occasional platform for the extended contemplation of single works from a variety of periods and contexts. This new initiative functions as a space apart from the determinative logics and pressures of our formal exhibition program. Traversing both vast distances and infinitesimal niches, each presentation will be accompanied by a commissioned text approaching the work as a dynamic palimpsest in conversation with the unique social and historical circumstances of our city. Playfully referencing Toriyama Akira’s hyperbolic time chamber—a fictive dimension for self-cultivation in which the laws of space-time are transformed—TRST proposes a speculative epistemology grounded in non-Western philosophical resources as one potential method for productively wandering the treacherous crags and precipices of globalized culture. The Room of Spirit and Time was a collaborative project which took place at the Queens Museum between 2018 and 2021. Its name and concept have been leased to Empty Gallery for an indefinite period of time in a convivial spirit.
For our second presentation, TRST will display a suite of related drawings by the seminal Bay-Area based artist and filmmaker Jordan Belson. A contemporary of Harry Smith, Oskar Fischinger and John Cage, Belson’s practice was driven by a life-long commitment to the exploration of cosmic structures and the expansion of human consciousness. Influenced by a deeply personal synthesis of the occult and the scientific, Belson developed a unique visual language of vibratory patterns, geometric motifs, and radial lines in order to express his vision of transcendental movement.
Belson’s Peacock Book drawings were executed in the early 1950s during a period of creative forment which saw him beginning to crystallize the style of abstract cinema for which he would become best known. Rendered in calligraphic strokes of ink and pastel on Chinese paper, these drawings are animated by a dynamic energy and phantasmagoric sense of movement—as if the celestial flickering of an entire Belson film had been condensed into a single moment of visual density.
Special thanks to Matthew Marks Gallery and the Estate of Jordan Belson.
Jordan Belson (1926–2011) is a seminal figure in twentieth-century avant-garde cinema. He studied painting as a young man, receiving a degree in studio art from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1946. He initially achieved success as a painter, exhibiting his work at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New York’s Guggenheim Museum, then known as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, in the late 1940s. After 1950, however, he settled in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood and focused primarily on filmmaking. Although he continued to make paintings and drawings for the remainder of his life, he never exhibited this part of his work again publicly during his lifetime.
