The Transcendental Painting Group (1938-41), Los Alamos and shamanism
Drew, Tracy (2018) The Transcendental Painting Group (1938-41), Los Alamos and shamanism. PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts/University of Brighton.
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The Transcendental Painting Group (1938-41), Los Alamos and shamanism: marginalised philosophies, forgotten artistic practices and contemporary film making in the New Mexico landscape.
This project examines an intersection between three elements that co-exist in the same geographical and temporal site and proposes that this intersection generates a unique synchronicity between past and present, power and place and the agency of a forgotten art practice. The three elements are the practice and theosophical beliefs of the under-researched Transcendental Painting Group (1938-41), the nuclear landscape of New Mexico and shamanism.
Interrogating these elements through methodologies that include art history, film theory, psychoanalysis and psychogeography reveals interplay between ancient mythologies, militaristic science and artistic positions that gives the local site a singular global agency and produces new possibilities for marginalized philosophies and forgotten artistic voices within the framework of
an artistic practice.
Critical reflection and questions interrogated in the theoretical investigation are given form through a subjective filmmaking practice that together with the thesis forms a single unified project. Overall, practice blends documentary film, drama and archival materials to conjure ghosts, spectres and occult events. This haunted aesthetic aims to identify unresolved issues from this conflicted landscape that are unique to the site yet generate anxieties of universal significance.
Copyright © and Moral Rights for this thesis are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners.
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