Reception — Numina: Six Artists Exploring Consciousness • Gallery 1337

Numina Six Artists Exploring Consciousness • Gallery 1337

October 2–November 14, 2026 • Exhibition Dates November 13, 5–8pm • Reception & 2nd Friday Art Walk

Artists:
Fariba Bogzaran, Nancy Genn, Mike Grady, Jeremy Morgan, Zea Morvitz, Peter de Swart

Curator:
Fariba Bogzaran, cofounder, Lucid Art Foundation.

In collaboration with the Lucid Art Foundation

Curatorial Statement

This exhibition presents art as a way of knowing. Entering the unknown territories of consciousness and inner spaces, requires multiple approaches. Science and art offer different, yet complementary, ways of exploring phenomena. The quantitative methods of science and the qualitative inquiries of artistic practice illuminate experience from different directions. Art contributes to this broader understanding through its capacity to reveal and communicate dimensions that might otherwise remain unseen or invisible.

Art is a form of inquiry that creates an intersubjective encounter between the artwork and the viewer. A work of art is not merely an illustration of knowledge acquired elsewhere; it can itself become a site of discovery.

The unveiling of inner space likewise calls for a multiplicity of approaches. In this exhibition, each artist enters this world through a distinct visual language, revealing dimensions of inner and outer experience through abstraction, automatism, alchemy, nature, light, and energy.

The artworks themselves become portals. Some invite contemplation and sustained attention; others seize us immediately. Each offers a different threshold between the known and the unknown.

The Exhibition
I was invited to curate this exhibition exploring the relationship between art and consciousness and to participate as one of the exhibiting artists. Given the breadth and depth of this subject, Numina offers only a glimpse into the long and sustained explorations represented here. This exhibition creates a constellation of artworks rather than a comprehensive survey.

Intentionally, I chose artists in the later stages of their careers. For decades, they have pursued questions concerning art, consciousness, and the unknown. Their work reflects sustained inquiry into inner experience and its relationship to the world around us.

The Artists
Three artists in this exhibition—Mike Grady, Jeremy Morgan, and myself—were professors in the Department of Arts and Consciousness at JFK University in Berkeley, California. Our practices were shaped by Western art traditions as well as Asian philosophy and aesthetics. Grady and Morgan were both inspired by J. M. W. Turner, while my own work was influenced by the surrealists, particularly Giorgio de Chirico, and, more profoundly, my experiences of lucid dreaming and hypnagogia.

For Grady, art, meditation, and yoga are inseparable, joined in a single state of awareness. Morgan's paintings seek to register “the magic, the mystery, the beauty and the enigmatic nature of being,” reflecting his understanding of consciousness as that which connects us indivisibly to nature. All three of us have engaged, in different ways, with Buddhist and Taoist philosophies and practices, yet each approaches consciousness through a distinct artistic language and practice.

Nancy Genn's paintings immediately resonated with qualities central to this exhibition: meditation, abstraction, and an openness to experience beyond representation. Her lifelong dedication to painting and her affinity with the work of Mark Tobey offer another path into these territories. Exhibiting her work since 1947, Genn brings to this exhibition a remarkable lifetime of sustained artistic exploration.

Zea Morvitz and I have been part of the Bishop Pine Preserve artist community in Inverness, California, for three decades—a lineage connected to the writer Jacqueline Johnson and the artists Gordon Onslow Ford, J. B. Blunk, and John Anderson. While alchemy may be an implicit influence in the work of some of our works, it enters Morvitz's work explicitly. Her visual language transforms elements of nature into living presences, where transformation becomes both a material and a psychic process.

Peter de Swart's work creates a threshold between what he calls “presence and absence.” His work invites us into the space between the visible and the invisible. Working across sculpture, painting, and multimedia installation, he creates environments that evoke the contemporary, the sublime, and the otherworldly. The opening verse of the Tao Te Ching reminds us that what can be named or spoken is not the eternal Tao. De Swart similarly observes that “what is not said is as important as what is said; language is steeped in silence.”

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