For three months in 1964, a couple of years before Timothy Leary advised the masses to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” California-born artist Steven Arnold lived on the small island ofFormentera, off the coast of Spain. There, he took LSD every day, made weird costumes, played with paint, and slept in caves with a group of fellow American art students. “This new drug was so euphoric and visionary, so positive and mind expanding … I ascended to another dimension, one so beautiful and spiritual that I was never the same,” Arnold said of the experience.
Today the sentiment might sound like a hippie cliche, but the surreal photographs these experiences inspired are anything but. After leaving Formentera, Arnold created hundreds of otherworldly, black-and-white tableaux vivant — gender- and mind-bending takes on imagery from classical mythology and religious texts (i.e. one photo entitled “Fag Jesus”). Here, body-painted models are strung up on gleaming crosses, porcelain dolls sprout from a goddess head in mandala-like patterns, and angels with Illuminati-pyramid loincloths emerge from scallop shells.
by Carey Dunne on December 9, 2015
