Exhibition

George Nelson Preston

5 Sep 2024 – 19 Oct 2024

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00
Friday
10:00 – 18:00
Saturday
10:00 – 18:00
Sunday
10:00 – 18:00

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Ryan Lee

New York
New York, United States

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About

RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present Ayahuasca Notebook Paintings: Journeys and Returns, the gallery’s second exhibition of works by George Nelson Preston. This new body of paintings were all created in the past two years. Ayahuasca is a part of Preston’s practice, entwined with his deep exploration of his own family and ancestral heritage connecting to native peoples of the United States, Africa and Brazil. Preston has deep ties to Brazil, and it has been an important place in his life and imagination since he first traveled there in the 1980s.

The subtitle “Journeys and Returns” mirrors the trajectory of an ayahuasca experience. Preston explains, “When you ‘travel’ by ayahuasca you metaphorically climb a mountain, ‘repair’ at the summit and come back down to earth accompanied by native guardians, spoken words and music. As you journey, if you do not resist or fear you will go through many states of mind that take away fear, hate and all the anti-humanist instincts.

Preston began painting as a teenager in the 1950s while at the same time beginning a spiritual journey. He continued this path of discovery in the 1960s through reading anthropologist Weston La Barre’s The Peyote Cult and experimenting with psychotropic drugs in conjunction with researchers Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass) and Timothy Leary. (In a twist of fate, Preston would go on to marry La Barre’s niece.) The works in this show were inspired by Preston’s travels in Brazil from the 1980s onwards, where he embarked on painting, curatorial, writing, and teaching projects before eventually becoming acquainted with ayahuasca as well as native peoples such as the Huni Kuin (whose word for ayahuasca is “nixi pei”).

Many of these paintings use Preston’s distinctive color palette of grays, blues, and purples. He achieves a transparent and luminous paint quality through grinding pastel chalk with linseed oil. Some works in the exhibit reference specific locations — such as Arpoador Beach and Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon in Rio de Janeiro — and specific people — such as indigenous shamans who guide the ayahuasca process — while others portray imagined spaces in the land of the Huni Kuin.

The evocation of water is a recurring theme for Preston, along with his focus on spirituality and the history of the Atlantic region connecting the United States, South America, and Africa. With How I Introduced Shaman Txai Kuin and Okomfo Yaa Fosia, Preston makes explicit the connection between Africa and Brazil in Preston’s work. The diptych brings together two important figures in his life: an okomfo (a priest from Ghana) and a shaman. The work incorporates collaged paper to create vines, referencing the clinging lianas used to prepare ayahuasca. 

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George Nelson Preston

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