The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson: MANDALA & SAMADHI
Up to Free for members
Untitled c. 1965
Collage mounted on board
8⅛ × 7⅛ inches; 21 × 18 cm
-Jordan Belson
Psychedelic Sangha& Dharma Art Productions present,
“The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson:
MANDALA & SAMADHI”
Screening & Conversation
With Guest Speakers:
Erik Davis
Raymond Foye
Charles Stein
And moderator Doc Kelley
Saturday, December 6th
3:00 pm. EST
LIVE ONLINE
(with asynchronous viewing option)
Step into the “Cosmic Cinema” of avant-garde artist Jordan Belson (1926-2011) with dharmanaut Erik Davis, the inestimable scholar and curator Raymond Foye, and legendary alchemical poet Charles Stein.
Join us online for this rare opportunity to engage deeply with Belson’s films “Mandala” and “Samadhi,” as well as some of his two-dimensional art from the 1940s until his death in 2011.
We will take our time through the collection, meditating on each work, before engaging our guest speakers in a moderated conversation to share their thoughts and reflections.
We hope you will join us online for this deep dive into the work of a true elder in the lineage of Psychedelic Buddhism, and a profound influence on Psychedelic Sangha and Dharma Art Productions.
We are very grateful to the Belson estate for making these materials available.
Jordan Belson (1926-2011) was one of those singular visionaries, a remarkable Bay Area-based artist and filmmaker whose meditative, trance-like 16mm shorts, most of which Belson created, in part, on a light table of his own design, are numinous, poetic, and aesthetically ravishing. Having already turned on before the Beats showed up — he was an old friend of Harry Smith when Smith still lived in the Bay — Belson walked his path of art mysticism for many decades, studying meditation, yoga, and comparative religion, and consuming more than the occasional visionary compound. His lifelong devotion to the Mystery shows in the best of ways. Films like “Samadhi”, “Cosmos”, and “Chakra” hand your third eye to you on a mandalic platter, plumbing the esoteric implications of abstraction so fundamental to modern art. But they also capture aspects of the internal phenomenology of meditation and trance like few other visual artifacts I know. Forget 2001: A Space Odyssey; in terms of cosmic cinema, this is The Shit.
-Erik Davis
