Design Miami/ 2021

In honor of our tenth consecutive year at Design Miami/, Jason Jacques Gallery is pleased to present, for the fair’s December 2021 edition, a transformative collaboration by Nick Weddell and Jason Jacques.

The gesamtkunstwerk, titled CEREMONY, consists of a recreation of an Ayahuasca ceremony from the planet Zeefromzeglop, beamed back down to Earth via an intergalactic portal located in the artist’s eyes and brain. A true technological marvel, the portal was opened some years ago by Gorglax, an intrepid alien explorer from Zeefromzeglop, in order to pass on knowledge and help the Earth and its inhabitants to survive the planetary changes to come.

Our current epoch, an age of upheaval rife with inequality, mirrors one of the most-studied, and ultimately transformative eras in the history of Gorglax’s native planet— a fact which gives hope to artists, activists, and scholars alike. Indeed, Gorglax’s offer of transcendent knowledge is an opportunity for humankind to find it’s own path out of the data-driven dark age of hyperindividualism, atomization, and alienation we’ve fallen into. It’s not too late to reconnect with our own Earth and, as they say on Zeefromzeglop, become the pollen on the solar wind blowing through the cosmic jungle.

That old adage is a nod to the fact that everything in the cosmos is connected through cracks in space-time that are universally opened and accessible to the human consciousness through plant medicine, the mind-opening power of which— with it’s awe-inspiring ability to provide us a glimpse of the expansive, cascading lattice of a universal meta-organism without end— is not very different from the more earthly framework that good art and great design provide for interpreting and re-interpreting the world around us.

On show are a collection of tapestries depicting the great spirit animals and plants that were saved as a result of Gorglax’s sacrifices, accompanied by ceremonial artifacts and objects from actual plant medicine ceremonies on Zeefromzeglop. The Zeefromzeglopian ritual space on view is a 1:1 reconstruction of one recently excavated in the dense, lowland rainforests that dot the northern hemisphere of the planet, visualized and realized by our friend and fellow artist, Rem Denizen. Called a Pleroma Dome, the structure is a hybrid of tree and crystal, stone that breathes, made up of an external upper-lattice covered in moss, and a lower trunk covered in hexagonal rhytidomes, of plates of bark. Internally, the Dome’s precisely geometric walls are made of a grained, blond wood.

We’ve brought the dome, the artefacts, and an intergalactic space portal here today because we have great expectations for the upcoming seismic shift in the collective human unconscious— a shift towards a renewed connection with our planet, towards a world full of care and empathy for our fellow creatures. We’re casting off fear of the unknown and setting off on a quest for re-enchantment.

Text by Grace Nkem / Courtesy of Jason Jacques Gallery