Richard Hawkins: Celestial Telegraph Paintings

Already in his previous works Richard Hawkins (*1961, lives in Los Angeles) engaged with the history and myths of the North American Indians. In these subjective ethnographic researches the artist speculates about his own Indian forbears and with this about an assumed suppression of religious cults of the Indians as a kind of blind spot within American culture. Inspired in the main by phenomenological approaches to the spirit world and attempts to capture its phantoms in pictures, above all in the spirit photography of the 19th century and early painterly abstractions, Hawkins with his “Celestial Telegraph Paintings” develops hybrid pictures somewhere between cult objects and archetypal technology for transmitting and receiving messages from the spirit world.

Richard Hawkins
Celestial Telegraph Paintings