I have meditated on the visual representations and being of time in mushrooms that grow on trees. 
A dendrocronological time. 
All the lines are creating an optical effect.
And therein it takes another kind of time to look at them.

During this time of isolation i have gone deep into a self on my long walks in the woods and looked at these mushrooms. I read that most of the mushrooms are growing because the tree is wounded and on it way to dying or already dead, and i have thought a lot about my own future dying that i am on my way to inevitably. contemplating my mortality and letting myself feel it. In this quarantine i both seemed to have all the time in the world and no time at all. It is a time of now or never when you want to do things with your life.

the analog drawings are then flipped and reversed in order to create symmetri and resonate with the digital and the internet which is also a nature in itself. The mushrooms mycelium under ground connects the trees like we are connected by the world wide web.
and the drawings become more than just representations of reality, but an abstraction of it, to think, feel and question the experiences i have in the world in me and around me.

I hope this is enough contextulisations.
You can ask for more if you want

also check my instagram here:
https://www.instagram.com/stefanbakmand/

Dendrocronological meditations

I am doing a series of drawings on lsd paper, which is dealing with the discovery of lsd and its mystical religious backstory in elussinian mysteries and medieval bread hallucinations.

These drawings are preparations for a project called Bosch Fungi that i had to do at the danish art workshops in Copenhagen 11th of may to 31st of july 2020. Now the residency has been shortened, limiting my time there, putting more pressure on getting things things ready for my exhibitions in Aarhus this fall.

I investigate the discovery of lsd and the counterculture of the 60s, and its connection to medieval masshallucinations from bread decases and the Eleusinian Mysteries in greece.
Painters like Bosch and Breugel would depict a phenomenon called Saint Anthonys fire which came from the hallucinations caused by ergot, the deceased rye. Albert Hoffman, as swiss chemist was doing experiments with ergot at Sandoz labs for other purposes and accidentaly got it on his skin, experiencing an altered perception and thus LSD became a tool for the counterculture of the 60s.

I did a video about it:
Bosch Fungi, the history of LSD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPH0kMZhSxA&t=2s

Here, the drawing surface of the paper becomes a story in itself, refering to the distribution and ingestion of lsd, where you put the small squares on your tongue for the saliva to optain it faster.
It became the hippie sacrament in the 60s and 70s, like the flesh of christ that you receive through an oblate in church.

The grid of the tabs are making a background structure for all the drawings that keeps them together. the grid is making an idea of a fluid narrative.

Also I wish to meet researchers like psychologists and neurologists on the effects of psychoactive substances. And also to meet antropologists about the spirituality of these uses.


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Stefan Bakmand Andersen