In 1992 The Smithsonian Institution approached Ken Kesey to acquire his painted bus with which him and his crew, The Merry Pranksters, famously embarked on an LSD fuelled American road trip in 1964. In response, Kesey said:
“Giving this bus to the Smithsonian would be like putting your balls in a golden box and sending them to the queen. It would be a nice thing to do, but it would be a mistake.”
Julie Boldt and Leonardo Liccini present Pulp & Pareidolia, a collaborative show curating various unusual artefacts that have fallen through the cracks of history.
Previously working with sound and light, both artists set out to include archival practice as a forum between absurdity and familiarity. Pulp & Pareidolia occupies the distance that this dialect births and utilizes history as material.
Through assorted documents and samples, the audience is invited to ‘enter the objects,” floating through their peculiar, yet overlooked occurrences that weave in and out of our tapestry of recorded history.
Finally, Pulp & Pareidolia puts our structures of memory under pressure and exposes the pulp of accumulated history and its potential for retrospective pareidolia.