Tappeto Volante proudly announces "Pale Hekate’s Team," a two-person show featuring sculpture by Elizabeth Insogna and drawings by Jesse Bransford, opening on June 9th, 2024, from 6 to 8 PM.

Two artists speak to ancient magic through a circle, a serpent, and a tree.

Elizabeth Insogna’s large-scale ceramic sculptures and Jesse Bransford’s drawings channel a magical vocabulary across media, through abstraction rooted in the symbolism of Greek myth and diverse mystery traditions.

Elizabeth Insogna’s work returns to Hekate, a goddess of the ancient world, with symbology related to choice, power, and the construction of life at crossroads. Her work explores the metaphor of fire to transform, serpents as a bridge between consciousness, the wheel that turns time, and the cave which burrows into the earth multi-directionally. First referenced in Homeric hymns from the seventh century BCE, Hekate is described with a bright headband, tender in heart and thoughts, and able to perceive (Persephone) from her cave. Ancient symbols of the serpent, circle, and tree, according to pre-monotheistic ideas, point toward the goddess. This is embodied and exemplified in the serpent-bird figures found in the archaeological discoveries of Marija Gimbutas, originating from the Neolithic age.

Insogna’s large-scale ceramic sculptures create a space in the present to imagine ancient magic that is queer by nature. The embedded symbols, conceived through ritual meditation practices, signify a wild language based on intuitive emotive gestures and evoke a powerful relationship that relies on direct communication between worlds. Her works combine hand-building and wheel-thrown forms, creating large sculptures in the round and shaped wall works, in some ways similar to Betty Woodman. She mixes and creates her own glaze combinations on T1 stoneware.

Jesse Bransford’s work relies on the tension and torsion between order and chaos. Order finds its locus in the tradition of the magic circle, both as a charm and talisman and as a site of evocation and invocation. The chaos, more elusive, comes from the possibilities of the body and the trace of gesture. Here, the relation between the macrocosm and the microcosm finds its locus. The order, floating in the chaos of various watercolor drawings, seeks orientation: the glyphs are adrift, only barely helping to articulate some semblance of space.

The 'look and feel' of Bransford’s drawings consider several Surrealist strategies, especially concerning ideas of picture and landscape. Less the deserts of Dali, de Chirico, and Tanguy, these works conflict with space in the lines of Zürn, Klee, and Michaux. A space for a longer thought on drawing lurks in the margins. Wash is transfigured in strange ways by the incessant points, dots, and fields of stars that make their way between the color and miasma. The chaos belies an absent body, a body looking and feeling.

Bransford’s floor circle comes together with Insogna’s ceramic sculptures. Based on evidence of the cult of Hekate, the circle is known as a hecterion: triplicity and triads abound in the geometry of the image, and the goddess, spoken to via the energy the circle engenders, is at all times invited into the space. The liminality, the veil, is particularly thin at choice moments.

"Pale Hekate’s Team" will include ritual performances led by Elizabeth Insogna in which her sculptures will move and change, alongside a special performance created by Kay Turner based on Turner’s previous performance for Mary Beth Edelson.

The performance will take place on June 12th, with doors opening at 6 PM and the performance starting at 7 PM. Please find more details HERE.

Elizabeth Insogna is a ceramic based artist focused on the realm of the divine feminine through queer and feminist space as well as occult practices. She has a BFA in sculpture from SUNY New Paltz and an MFA from Brooklyn College. Past solo exhibitions include Tracing the Spirit at RAR gallery in Berlin and Psyche’s Reason in NYC. Two and three person exhibitions include, Doesn’t Hold Water at Underdonk and Hekate’s Grove at FiveMyles Gallery. She has participated in group exhibitions at Bill Arning Exhibitions, Tappeto Volante, The Abrons Art Center, The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, and in multiple curatorial projects by The Sphinx Northeast. Elizabeth Insogna has created and participated in numerous ritual performances with her work which are part of their activation including Scrying Ritual, 2017 (Abrons Art Center), Healing Persephone’s Wounds with Kay Turner (National Arts Club, 2021), The Croning, Invited by Liz Collins with Kay Turner, Stoneleaf Retreat for Upstate Art Weekend, 2022, and most recently The Double Sun with Kay Turner, Bill Arning exhibitions, 2024. Her work has been featured in Artsy, Magic Praxis, Huffington Post, Abraxas Journal, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint and The Brooklyn Rail. 

Jesse Bransford is a New York-based artist whose work is exhibited internationally. He holds degrees from the New School for Social Research (BA), Parsons School of Design (BFA) and Columbia University (MFA). A professor of art at New York University, Bransford's work has been involved with belief and the visual systems it creates since the 1990s. Work has been presented in books from Fulgur Press, “A Book of Staves (Galdrastafabók),” and most recently “The Fourth and Fifth Pyramids.” He lectures widely on his work and the topics surrounding his work. He is the co-organizer of the biennial Occult Humanities Conference. More information can be seen at www.jessebransford.com.