CURRENT EXHIBITION

FEEDING OUR DEMONS
featuring
Eva Davidova, Sarah Grass, Alexandra Hammond
Abigail Simon and Marina Zurkow

Guest Curation by Hovey Brock
May 3 - June 15, 2025
Opening reception Saturday May 3, 4-7pm


1053 Gallery is pleased to present Feeding Our Demons, a group exhibition featuring works by Eva Davidova, Sarah Grass, Alexandra Hammond, Abigail Simon and Marina Zurkow. Guest curated by Hovey Brock, the exhibition will be on view from May 3 through June 15, 2025, with a public reception on Saturday, May 3, from 4 to 7pm.

The artists in this show bring to life political, economic, and cultural issues through storytelling with characters. Eva Davidova’s virtual reality pieces and videos throw us into vertiginous settings which we see through the eyes of mythic personae. Sarah Grass’ line drawings feature the adventures of a magical dachshund who undergoes radical transformations. Alexandra Hammond paints sentient landscapes whose moods mirror our own. Abigail Simon and MarinaZurkow’s collaboration, The Iceberg, is a tarot-inspired deck of images that encourages players to uncover unexpected connections and new strategies around the subject of climate change. What these artworks achieve is similar to a contemplative method developed by Lama Tsultrim Allione that she calls “Feeding Your Demons”.

For this method, Lama Tsultrim adapted the Tantric practice, Chöd, developed by the 11th century Buddhist nun Machig Labdrön, to Western psychology by incorporating ideas from Jungian analysis and Internal Family Systems. In Tsultrim’s reboot of Chöd, we locate a personal obstacle in our lives–such as a fear, addiction, depression, eating disorder--somewhere in our body as a sensation–a tightness in our shoulders, a stomach ache etc. Then we personify that bodily feeling as a demon with as much detail as we can muster. We then enter into conversation with it, and nourish it with our attention, rather than ignoring or suppressing it. With sufficient feedings we encourage the demon to release the mental energies it had bound up in destructive behaviors. Sometimes we have to deal with a god, an obsession that holds us back like beauty or wealth. At the end of this process we may encounter an ally, a figure appearing in the god/demon’s place that helps us going forward.

According to Lama Tsultrim, in addition to personal demons there are outer demons that feed on the ignorance, greed or anger of groups. These are the ones Davidova, Grass, Hammond, Simon, and Zurkow put before us. Their sticky portrayals of outer gods and demons, cultural obsessions and collective obstacles, invite us to viscerally connect with our communal challenges. How does it physically feel to witness, never mind experience, a massive hurricane, a record-breaking heat wave, a terrorist attack, a genocide? Aching shoulders? Upset stomach? Shortness of breath? What happens when we engage not only our minds but our bodies–skin, muscles, bones, guts–in contemplating climate change, forever wars, political polarization, and so on? Would that added awareness turn us in new directions?A cynic would say that such an exercise wouldn’t do a thing to address real problems like an economic order addicted to the fossil fuels degrading our planet. But cynicism is what happens when ideas stagnate and we cling to the way we’ve always done things. Cynicism is what happens when we cut off our powers of empathize with our bodies what others are going through. Could that tightness in your chest you feel when you think about lives devastated by a climate-related fire or flood move you to action? The artists in this show call on us to feed the gods and demons of the climate and other crises with our complete, whole-bodied attention in order to transform our fear, distractions, and apathy into engagement. Who knows what allies we will find?


SELECTED WORKS