Early in 1980, a friend who freelanced for a wire service was in Oregon to cover the hostility between the Rajneeshpuram and its neighbors in Oregon. The colors-of-the-rising-sun community (later famed for poison and guns) invited him to spend the night. Directed to a pup tent, he found on his pillow several condoms and a pair of rubber gloves, in case he happened to get lucky.
The Rajneesh were pioneers of the antiseptic erotic. They favored frolic but feared additions to their bacterial count. Anyone aspiring to an evening of bliss had to agree to wear the gloves. Thirty years later, Elizabeth Jameson creates art that could be said to be made in their image. She too tends to favor shades of the rising sun, and she too imagines a world in which absurd safeguards to health are essential.
In that world, the air you breath is out to get you. Isolation wraps each figure, even when they’re holding hands.
No one mourns or appears to notice anything out of the ordinary in their downward evolutionary spiral, from the human to a space-age insect realm.
In 1968, Philip Dick asked, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? What are the dreams of Jameson’s women? Silks made of rose petals and of blood, as distant as the North Star.
At Fetherston Gallery through Dec. 19
loved reading about rising-sun community I never knew that..