Nothing guarantees a crowd like the promise of explicit drug use - or at least the chance to hear about explicit drug use and vicariously experience the high through the artwork it inspired.
"Psychedelic Art Extravaganza" did just that. The event, in Metcalf Auditorium Thursday, featured a video presentation of psychedelic artists discussing their mediums, motivations and motifs and included a slideshow of their pieces.
Though the artists who appeared on the video all had unique interpretations of their experimentation with different drugs, they all echoed the sentiment that narcotics gave them a sense of interconnectedness with and understanding of the world around them that they tried to translate into visual representation.
The video's first speaker, Alex Grey, described his artwork, which he explained as images of human figures releasing their energy when they have freed themselves from the prison of their molecular bonds through the use of narcotics.
Alex opened with slides inspired by his first LSD trip, which he experienced with his wife and fellow speaker at the conference, Allyson Grey. The pieces depicted the "interconnectedness" that stemmed from their trip and the intimacy it spawned.
"Artwork came to be about normal, everyday things ... like sex when you're tripping," Alex said. "We were intersecting with everyone else and everything else."
Allyson Grey similarly said all her art sprung from her profound experiences with LSD.
Allyson's artwork is devoid of the human images that consume her husband's art. Instead she uses oil colors to emphasize the idea that humans are made of cells and systems that occur in three different states: chaos, order and secret writing.
Allyson said these three states defined every aspect of life. "We're all cut-out pieces of the chaos we live in," she said. Order, on the other hand, is where people briefly find respite from the chaos through the use of drugs. Secret writing is the "window between chaos and order" that represents the secret writing of all the religions, Allyson said.
Allyson's pieces focused on color and the interaction of shapes and used such thick layers of oil paint that the pieces seemed to oscillate on the two-dimensional surface.
Mark Henson, another speaker in the video, used marijuana and LSD as his artistic muses. His art is an attempt to crystallize his hallucinations into some more tangible form.
Henson made the transition to psychedelic art when he read a Life magazine article in high school about LSD-inspired art.
The article featured a painting that resembled how Henson had painted his room while experimenting with lesser drugs. Henson said he realized he was onto something and went to the local McDonald's the next week to score some LSD.
Henson said he learned that by taking large doses of LSD and mushrooms he became a "disciple of knowledge" and drugs became "a learning tool."
Despite the inspirational power of meditation, Henson said, it was easier to duplicate his inspiration with the aid of LSD, so he gave up the drug as a social activity and started using it for meditative purposes in order to enhance his art.
Henson's pieces focused on human images and their natural existence with nature.
This emphasis on nature is meant to inspire peace and happiness, he said. "By distracting people with sex and loving, we'll have less fighting. ... War is the enemy of all of our art," Henson said.
Though the artists' explanations of their works gave insight into an otherwise mysterious art form, an intermission of Nico Clark's "Summertime" provided the direct mental stimulation most of the audience had probably expected from the event.
"Summertime" is a computer-animated short film that depicts the dance of nature and the interconnectedness of all living things. When "Summertime" premiered at the Brooklyn International Film Festival, it won the Audience Award for Animation. Since then, it has garnered four other film awards.
In the seamless animation, "Summertime's" visuals flawlessly melt into one another and bring the audience on a three-dimensional tour of a drug-induced dream Clark had that took 10 years to translate into media.
The video provides constant mental stimulation, gliding over the top of an albatross's wings into a dense forest where a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly, which rests on an embracing couple, who are swept over by a wave transporting a group of dolphins above an underground volcano that gives birth to the sun.
While the speakers in the video try to capture their hallucinations in a frozen image, Clark compiles the images of his dream into a hypnotic hallucination the audience can experience with him.
"("Summertime") utilizes the technology to tell a story that could not have been told any other way," the official "Summertime" Web site said.
Psychedelic Art Extravaganza was presented by Brown Students for a Sensible Drug Policy as part of Psychedelic Week.
