Zhivago Duncan

During this years art week, artist Zhivago Duncan will host an open studio.

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Zhivago Duncan (1980) is a multimedia artist living and working in Mexico City. Duncan is currently working on large scale batik paintings and sculpture that will be exhibited at ZONA MACO this February 2020. These works form part of his ongoing project When our Pineal Glands were Big, a unique story of creation drawn from imagery in ancient texts such as the Enuma Elis, Bible, the Popol Vuh, the Nommo, Lakota stories and other myths of creation. Duncan connects them all together creating other worlds through his visual narrative.

Zhivago Duncan explores these theories through in his visual narratives. Using batik as his medium, his canvases depict imaginary worlds which could be microscopic views or gigantic universes where geometric meanings are inter-connected and architecture holds philosophical values.

Duncan’s works are in the Perez Art Museum collection Miami, the Saatchi Collection London, the Me Collection, Berlin, the Barjeel Collection in Sharjah and Various other private collections worldwide. Along with his solo representation this Zona Maco 2020, Duncan will be opening the doors of his studio in Mexico City offering a view into his production process.

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Comprised of a series of paintings and a large sculpture in a vitrine, When Our Pineal Glands were Big is an installation that consolidates a narrative that Duncan has been creating through visual and texual works over the past 2 years. The ongoing project proposes a synthetic theory of the transfer of technology from metaphysical to physical through the shrinkage of the pineal gland over the evolution of mankind.

In ancient times, human beings had much larger pineal glands as wild animals continue to exhibit. Due to the significantly larger size of our brains in proportion to our body we were able to not only to tap into natural tides and ”Universal connection and communication” but also deeper telepathic understanding of each other. Through the various toils of human evolutions and the change in diet and living conditions, Mankind, lost significant connection to the earth through the shrinkage of the gland over the eons.

In this earlier state, humans were able to see beyond the physical realms of the world. They were able to look into another reality, its mathematical construction, or what we can call its biological structure. The stuff you see under a microscope. The geometry of things can be seen today under states of hallucination where Dymthyltriptomine increases the activity in the pineal gland for example. LSD, psilocybin, DMT and other such substances activate the pineal gland.

Previous to the Sumerians, humans had a very advanced civilization living in harmony with its natural surroundings. They had tapped into biological technology. Man was able to communicate with each other across vast planes through other dimensions of existence. People were able to communicate with each other just as easy as it is for us to pick up a cellphone today. We coexisted with the earth. This was the result of hundreds of thousands of years of research through evolution. As today at the pinnacle of that civilization, should some natural disaster happen and wipe them out, they would not be able to rebuild it from scratch. Eventually this happened: A massive meteor shower struck earth and created mass extinctions through flooding, earthquakes and tidal waves, volcanoes erupted and gazes scorched the earth.

Very few survived, mainly those who lives underground in caves of the unaffected areas of the earth evidenced in global myths of creation. This disaster is the flood that we read of in every single origin story. Once that had happened, mankind was clueless to its own survival let alone his supernatural technology. That was the point where we began again as base animal hunter gatherer.

In the aftermath, the humans who were still connected to the ancient way transformed sacred metaphysical information into physical realities matching the concrete nature of the disaster. Through evolution and survival mankind slowly changed their diet from nomadic to non-migratory through the cultivation of wheat. This fundamentally changed the living conditions, resulting in the regression of the pineal gland. As the nature of their physical environment was mastered, mankind lost the deep knowledge of their surroundings. The apparent ordering of the world, in fact saw the birth of physical chaos. Biological memory and ancestral knowledge led to the metamorphosis of technology. During the thousands of years of civilization, mankind manifested this knowledge by breaking down and concentrating the environment and natural technology into their own forms. Before the ancients could cut stone through concentrated sound; now we make tool out of concentrated iron ore to do so. Man has passed from telepathic communication to cellphone. This evolution has forced man to sway from the biological entirety and forced him to extract the most potent elements of natures elements to concentrate it and combine them to create physical tools. Man went from perfect existence in a metaphysical world to a forced physical existence where any alternative reality is seen as dysfunctional or irrational.

These painting are studies of eternal notions of value, psychological, mathematical, physical and metaphysical ideas of the creation of the world. One may say they are microscopic views of much larger elements or they are just architecture holding psychological values. The representation of connectivity gives birth to a line of mythological human structure crossing over to stories of gods and nature of a once harmonious world.

–– Kit Hammonds