NYAB Event - Diana Puntar “The Milky Way…Get Your Orgone On”

Diana Puntar “The Milky Way…Get Your Orgone On”

Blackston

This event has ended.

Blackston presents The Milky Way…Get Your Orgone On, a solo exhibition by Diana Puntar.

This exhibition is the culmination of Puntar’s multifaceted, four-year investigation of various utopian inventions and contemporary scientific and artistic explorations that seek to relieve humanity of illness and suffering. While a significant number of altruistic practices and theories of the past century have been dismissed or debunked, Puntar has chosen to combine potentially real and imagined curatives - an Orgone Accumulator, a disco floor and a mushroom garden — in a single installation.

“Get Your Orgone On” is a freestanding eight-foot black cube with a single entryway on one side. The walls and ceiling of the cube are built according to the specifications of an “Orgone Accumulator”, the device invented by controversial psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in 1940 to capture “Orgone Energy”, a powerful force he proposed exists in the universe that has the ability to liberate human-kind of everything from violent conflicts to sexual inhibitions.

Following Reich’s original instructions the thick walls of the accumulator contain layers of steel wool and lambs wool that insulate the box and enable the “Orgone” to be captured. The interior surfaces are covered with mirror-like reflective stainless steel, creating the proper surface for the accumulator to “work”.

Upon entering the cube, the viewer steps onto a sheet of transparent etched Plexiglas, under which grows a garden of exotic mushrooms — widely promoted for their cancer-fighting and medicinal properties. Edge-lighting, synched to a sound track provided by NYC avant-pop band The Crystal Ark (a collaboration between Gavin Russom and Viva Ruiz), sends streaming bands of colored light across the floor, which is reflected onto the stainless steel walls. A club-like pulse of energy is at work while the viewer is bathed in invisible Orgone.

Each element of Puntar’s installation offers a conduit between reality and fantasy, providing the opportunity to lose oneself in the hallucinatory reverie brought on by utopian dreams, throbbing lights and the promise of supernatural phenomena. Puntar offers a rare occasion to celebrate, for the moment, the defiance of widespread historical predictions of humanity’s doom in 2012.

Diana Puntar is from New York and currently resides in California. She received her MFA from The School of The Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Select recent solo exhibitions include Pepe and Puntar’s Lucid Dream Lounge, Participant, Inc., 2012; Lived, Live, Evil, Devil, Oliver Kamm Gallery, 2008; Less Than Day, or Night, Project Room at PS1, Long Island City, 2007. Puntar has received grants from Pollack-Krasner Foundation (2012 and 2009), NYFA (2007) and has been in residence at Art Omi, Millay Colony and Yaddo.