Paul has been named as a recipient of the Scientific GOD Prize for his
valuable and tireless work done in the field of visionary arts.

See www.godprize.org

Thank you to Mr. Huping Hu!

Paul Laffoley has just been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.  Out of a group of almost 3,000 applicants the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awards only 180 Fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars.

Please visit for more information:

http://www.gf.org/fellows/16501-paul-laffoley

Paul Laffoley was featured on the cover of the American Visionary Art Museum’s journal (February 2009).  Their show The Marriage of Art, Science & Philosophy will be on view through September 6, 2009.

For more info visit http://avam.org/exhibitions/images/MASP%20Intro%20and%20more.pdf

Hi Paul, it’s Dave the fellow who met you in Toronto for your 60’s show and gave you the comic about the clock machine.
During your lecture you were talking about an aspect of the house of time that requires the creation of a neutron star as component.
My question is what do you imagine are the unanticipated effects of the stellar husbandry on the ecology of the solar system (ours or whichever one plays the petri dish)?

Here are a few of my own thoughts on this:
All the celestial phenomenon in the area are effecting each other and have probably reached some kind of an equilibrium, but I am thinking that by creating some new celestial phenomenon from scratch, transmuting one into another (a star into a sun) , or just milking a star for energy, that must upset the balance in some way which causes some kind of cascade effect. One direction I have been thinking about the effects of such technology is on the human psychic level. Celestial phenomenon can exert certain effects on our consciousness, solar flares, planetary alignments, etc) a new celestial event in the solar system may have some unanticipated psychic effects as humans are bombarded by different ratios of energy.

A more humorous side tangent is how we could develop totally man made zodiac houses by stellar husbandry cultivated constellations. Perhaps the science of star creation effects on the human electromagnetic organ in the future is perfected in ways that cultures can anticipate what celestial phenomenon where (or near what, or in combo with) will cause this effect on human behavior: a paint by stars programmable planetary culture.

Another direction I thought about is how the vacuum of outer may be an ecosystem lush in life. Perhaps there are life forms that seem to us to be just a bunch of space radiation, who knows dark matter could even be something comparable to algae in the ocean? If hypothetically there exist such life then the solar systems current configuration is the homeostasis for this life. One possible problem I can imagine occurring is if for a specific device (such as the house of time) a star with a very specific energy output is to be created, then when the star is born it may change unpredictably over time, baffling technicians, as unknown life forms begin to discover this new niche as a food source, a nesting material, who knows maybe even an aphrodisiac.
Another problem I can imagine is that by changing the solar ecosystem it may cause some life to die out and others to grow wildly and that may have some kind of terrible effect, who knows, a life form that may have been on the menu of some other species that starved to death can now eat our ionosphere freely.

I guess my question turned more into a rant but I figured you may find some of it interesting.

~Dave

Paul,

You were first made known to me through a DisinfoTV dvd given to me by a friend. I was amazed at the beauty and complexity of your work and what it represented for humanity. Your name pops up as I read this and that on the WorldWideWeb, almost synchronistically it seems. And today is no exception as it is Inauguration Day in the United States. I have no political ideology to speak of and while I’m not suspicious of Obama in the conspiracy theory sense, I can’t seem to jump on the bandwagon. I can’t imagine that the so-called “regime change” happening is really going to be all that different from what has come before. People being what they are seem to get hyper-excited about the next new thing and then move on to the next one. It’s like the attacks on September 11, 2001 (which I refuse to refer to in the short code which everyone else seems to favor) where “everything changed and the world changed and nothing would be the same”. And the newspapers cut out the sports sections temporarily and the sports writers wrote thoughtful articles questioning what is “important”. But now, almost 8 years later, things have gone back to “normal”; sports are still a national obsession, the flags are back in the basements or closets, and one day “Patriot Day”, as it’s now called, will be just another holiday in the vein of “Presidents Day”. A day that will have a retail sale named after it. I try to extricate my self from the frenzy of pop culture and the cult of celebrity and try to focus on spiritual and philosophical concerns, and I want to feel hope for a better future, but as I am currently unemployed in the convential sense that I have no incoming monetary sustenance I feel depressed and hopeless. I tend to read about esoteric things and have read conspiracy theory so I wonder about a “big picture” sort of thing. And I want life on earth to be free and exciting for everyone, but can’t imagine it being any different from the way it’s been for the last few hundred years. Many discoveries and advances have been made, but at the same time we have made steps backwards in terms of civil rights and religious superstition. It seems that there is only the illusion of progress and that the human race is standing still and not really moving forward, in terms of social change and cultural change in the arts. So I guess my questions, and I’m not exactly sure why I’m writing to you, is what am supposed to do to make things “better”? Or is it all true and that we are prisoners of alien overlords or are we simply doomed to the repetition of slavery for all time, in a Nietzschean “Eternal Return”?

PAUL LAFFOLEY: THE SIXTIES

OPENING RECEPTION, January 8, 6-8pm
with musical performance by Prince Rama of Ayodhya

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

In 2005, Paul Laffoley was served with an eviction notice from his studio premises of 38 years and the home of the Boston Visionary Cell. While the event was traumatic at the time, there were two positive developments that came about as a result of the forced relocation. First, he found a superior studio for the same rent AND the contents of the Cell could, for the first time, be fully inventoried and inspected for condition. Many of the works had been in storage at the Bromfield studio since Christmas, 1968 when Laffoley moved into a former utility room in downtown Boston. In the process of cleaning, restoring and photographing these early works for the upcoming catalogue raisonne, we realized it would be an excellent opportunity to finally present these early works in an exhibition format.
Therefore, it is with great pleasure that we present 10 paintings by Paul Laffoley realized between the years of 1965 and 1969.

Following a formal education from Brown in the classics, and architectural studies at Harvard, Laffoley would begin to assimilate and systematically cross-pollinate his related strands of intellectual inquiry. Following his suggestion that bridges be constructed between the two towers for safety, he was summarily fired by Yamasaki and returned to Boston. At that time, Laffoley had been painting in the basement of his family’s home completing what may be his first fully mature vision with The Cosmos Falls into the Chaos as Shakti Urborosi: the Elimination of Value Systems by Spectrum Analysis, 1965. From this point forward, Laffoley

began to formulate his unique painterly and informational approach to the two-dimensional surface.

Clearly devoting himself to painting by the mid sixties, he began a highly original approach based on extensive hand written journals documenting his research, diagrams, and footnoted predecessors to various theoretical developments. Laffoley first began to organize his ideas in a format related to eastern mandalas that embraced his interests in the spiritual. This quickly developed into three sub-groupings of work: Operating Systems, Psychotronic Devices, and their related Lucid Dreams. Conceived of as “structured singularities”, Laffoley never worked in series, but rather approached each project as a unique construct. Working in a solitary lifestyle, each 73 ½ x 73 ½ inch canvas would take one to three years to paint and code. By the late 1980’s, Laffoley began to move from the spiritual and the intellectual, and evolved to the view of his work as an interactive, physically engaging Psychotronic devices, a modern approach to trans-disciplinary enlightenment and its spiritual aura.

PAUL LAFFOLEY: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF REVELATION

This book of the artist’s writings recounts a pivotal dream that Laffoley had in 1961. Since that time, Laffoley’s work has been a constant, interdisciplinary quest to explore the structure, and mystery of knowledge and transcendence. His dense diagrammatic paintings bring together philosophy, history, science and the meaning and power of symbols. Edited by Jeanne Marie Wasilik. ISBN# 1878607057
Clothbound. 112 pp., 8 color plates, 56 black and white illustrations from popular culture.

Other exhibitions of works by Laffoley have been Structured Singularities (1989), Portaling (1997) Time Phase X (2005) Mind Physics (2006) In 1999, Laffoley had his first museum retrospective and second monograph entitled:

Paul Laffoley. Architectonic Thought-Forms: Gedankenexperiemente in Zombie Aesthetics, A Survey of the Visionary Art of Paul Laffoley Spanning Four Decades, 1967-1999, to the Brink of the Bauharoque. Texts by Elizabeth Ferrer, J.W. Mahoney, Paul Laffoley and Jeanne Marie Wasilik. Austin Museum of Art, 1999.

Paul Laffoley: The Sixties

Meta Gallery, Toronto

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Toronto, Canada, November 17, 2008-Meta Gallery is pleased to present The Sixties, an exhibition of works on canvas and paper by celebrated visionary artist Paul Laffoley. In this, his first show with the gallery, as well as his first ever solo exhibition in Canada, 10 works will be displayed, all executed between 1964 and 1973. In what would end up being the precursor to a clearly defined compositional stye, these early works represent the artist’s experiments with a range of aesthetic expressions to come to what some have referred to as “an authentic new artform”.

Utilizing an architecturally informed, highly graphic and diagramatical process the artist creates what he refers to as “taking cosmic themes and turning them into highly detailed earthworks”. Each painting, which can take up to 3 years to create, takes the viewer deep on a journey through the complexity of his visions, detailing abstract theories, futuristic devices and prophetic glimpses into the future where a vegetable house grown from a single bag of seeds in 3 months would solve the world’s housing shortage. In another, the definition of time travel is fulfilled by amplifying events of retro-cognition of the past and pre-cognition of the future through a device call a Geochronmechane. 

Common themes throughout the artist’s work are operating systems, embedded with information and connected in ways not previously considered. Most often the symbolism presented in Paul’s work is mediated by a system of text which connects disciplines as diverse as astrology, metaphysics, history, dimensionality, architecture, chemistry and biology to name but a few.

Through the arrangement and presentation within the works, an entirely new worldview unfolds, and one which is further brought into being by experiencing the works themselves. Laffoley considers many of his paintings to be ‘psychotronic’, or mass-consciousness interactive, meaning that rather than the painting representing an extraneous invention or idea, the painting is the thing itself.

Paul Laffoley was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1940 and has been working and living in Boston since 1966. Following his graduation from Brown with a degree in the Classics he attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1962-1963. After being dismissed for conceptual deviance he apprenticed with the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler in New York before returning to Massachusetts in 1965. Later that year he began painting in the style he is known for today in his parents basement in Belmont and in 1968 moved into what would become his home and studio for the next 40 years. This 18 x 30 foot utility room on the second floor of a downtown office building in Boston at 36 Broomfield St. was dubbed the Boston Visionary Cell. It was incorporated in 1971 as a non-profit art association encouraging art and architecture of the visionary genre. Since 1966 Laffoley has shown in over 200 exhibitions as well as four major exhibitions in New York at Kent Gallery entitled Singularities (1989), Portalling (1997), Time Phase X (2005) and Mind Physics (2007). In 1989, Kent Gallery published the first monograph on his work entitled The Phenomenology of Revelation. His second publication, entitled Architectonic Thought-Forms: Gedankenexperiemente in Zombie Aesthetics, A Survey of the Visionary Art of Paul Laffoley Spanning Four Decades, 1967-1999, to the Brink of the Bauharouque was a result of his first museum retrospective at the Austin Museum of Art in 1999. A catalogue raisonne of the artist’s complete works is currently in progress. 

The Sixties will be on view from November 29 to January 4, 2009. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 11-6 and Sunday from 12-5. The opening reception will be on November 29 from 7-10pm. Paul will also be giving a lecture on his art and life on Sunday November 30 from 5-8pm at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts.

For additional information please contact Meiko Kanamoto at 416.955.0500 or mk@metagallery.com.