The Cosmic Art of Jordan Belson

With Guest Speakers:
Charles Stein
Erik Davis
Raymond Foye

RECORDED LIVE ON ZOOM
Saturday, December 6th

Step into the cosmic art of avant-garde artist Jordan Belson (1926-2011) with dharmanaut Erik Davis, the inestimable scholar and curator Raymond Foye, and legendary alchemical poet Charles Stein.

Enjoy this deep dive into Belson’s films “Mandala” and “Samadhi,” as well as many of his two-dimensional artworks from the 1940s through his death in 2011.

We are very grateful to the Belson estate for making these materials available.

"Jordan Belson (1926-2011) was one of those singular visionaries, a remarkable Bay Area-based artist and filmmaker whose meditative, trance-like 16mm shorts, most of which Belson created, in part, on a light table of his own design, are numinous, poetic, and aesthetically ravishing. Having already turned on before the Beats showed up — he was an old friend of Harry Smith when Smith still lived in the Bay — Belson walked his path of art mysticism for many decades, studying meditation, yoga, and comparative religion, and consuming more than the occasional visionary compound. His lifelong devotion to the Mystery shows in the best of ways. Films like “Samadhi”, “Cosmos”, and “Chakra” hand your third eye to you on a mandalic platter, plumbing the esoteric implications of abstraction so fundamental to modern art. But they also capture aspects of the internal phenomenology of meditation and trance like few other visual artifacts I know. Forget 2001: A Space Odyssey; in terms of cosmic cinema, this is The Shit."

-Erik Davis

PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES ON THE DAY OF THE EVENT WE WERE UNABLE TO STREAM BELSON'S "SAMADHI" AND "MANDALA." HOWEVER, WE HAVE INCLUDED BOTH SHORT FILMS IN THE POST-PRODUCTION VIDEO RECORDING HERE.

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