Two new exhibits recently opened up in Denver, Colorado exploring themes surrounding magic mushrooms and cannabis.
The first exhibit is “Mycolandia,” which opened at the Dateline Gallery in Denver, Colorado on June 7 and will remain open through June 23. “MYCOLANDIA celebrates Mycology in general exploring the evolution of edible fungi and its symbiotic relationship with humanity. In otherwords, It’s a show about mushrooms. ,” the gallery said on social media.
The show features works from 13 different artists, such as Noah Travis Phillips. According to an interview with Westword, Phillips explained his thought process behind the theme. “I definitely thought of the diverse array of mushrooms,” Phillips said. “All the ways fungus and mushrooms exist in the world, the different ways that humans interface with them—whether as food, or an intoxicating substance, or all of the bio remediation people are doing with mushrooms.”
Art by Noah Travis Phillips at Dateline Gallery. Via Dateline Gallery
Attendees can view Phillips’ unique Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) AI images that he developed to represent mushrooms’ inherent psychedelic properties. “It’s much more colorful. They’re all rainbowy. They’re kind of melting. They’re kind of bulbous,” said Phillips. “I think they suggest interesting things about mushroom root networks—those mycorrhizae. Some of them look like they have spores drifting from them.”
He added that he’s been an artist for 25 years, and has spent about six years working with GAN. “My relationship to the GANs is like a poetic visual synthesizer for producing improvisatory material to collage with,” he explains. “I’m engaging in a dialogue with that kind of cutting edge of technology and seeing what its creative potential is.”
Phillips also cut out 45 images which are situated close to the floor, which forces viewers to look downward. “To me, setting them up …
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Author: Nicole Potter / High Times
