Private View: Sam Ashby: Sanctuary (Main Gallery) | Alexi Marshall: A Return to Innocence (Window Gallery)

Join us for the joint private view of Sanctuary, a new solo exhibition by London-based artist and filmmaker Sam Ashby in our Main Gallery, alongside A Return to Innocence, a window exhibition featuring mosaic works by Hastings-based artist Alexi Marshall.

Sam Ashby 
Sanctuary

San Mei Gallery presents Sanctuary, a solo exhibition by London-based artist-filmmaker Sam Ashby. Ashby’s practice turns to queer narratives from history, animating forgotten, hidden, and otherwise marginal lives through film, writing and publications. This exhibition features a new film commission, Sanctuary, exploring queer spirituality and utopian sexualities through the figure of Peter Purusha Androgyne Larkin (1934–1988).

Larkin was a North-American Catholic monk who became a notable early gay filmmaker before moving to San Diego to establish himself as a cosmic-erotic mystic. Shot on 16mm, Sanctuary offers a portrait of Larkin in absentia, weaving together the voices of his friends, lovers and those who have found inspiration in his work, evoking the life of a complex man who seems at once ahead of his time and yet inextricable from it.

In 1981, Larkin wrote and published The Divine Androgyne According to Purusha, which introduced his distinctive form of queer spirituality and functioned as a guidebook to achieve cosmic-erotic consciousness. Larkin’s theories drew inspiration from the Gay Liberation and the Human Potential/New Age Consciousness movements, as well as Buddhism, Tantra, and Jungian psychology. In his book, Larkin prophesied a new tribe of erotically enlightened humans – ‘Androgynes’ – who were free from the repressions that society and organised religion placed upon them. According to Larkin, Androgynes were ‘liberated and creative enough to go beyond the greatest taboo of our civilization: the fusion of sexual ecstasy and religious spirituality.’ Emerging from a context in which religion had long had a violently prohibitive relationship to homosexuality, Larkin attempted to cultivate a culture of religious practice on queerness’ own terms.

Housed within a purpose-built pentagonal structure based on a building designed by Larkin in the 1970s as his desert sanctuary, the film documents the complex and varied legacies of Larkin’s ideas, including his attempt to build an intentional community around the ‘sacred activity’ of fisting. The chorus of disparate and distinct voices Ashby assembles hints at the possibility of a community of ‘Divine Androgynes’ that Larkin’s bold work intended to manifest but which, as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, never came to be. Contemporary interpretations of queerness frequently position it within the framework of progressive liberalism, with its associated values of non-religiousness and tolerance. In Sanctuary, Ashby muses on an alternative and more confronting queer history steeped just as much in esotericism as eroticism, part of broader research by the artist into queer spiritual traditions with roots in late nineteenth-century Europe, particularly among theosophists, utopian socialists, and other dreamers.

Ashby’s camera tenderly observes the environments Larkin once inhabited – the palm-lined shores and desert mountains of San Diego – allthewhile tracing Larkin's diffuse influence within the suburban homes of the West Coast and the arid landscapes of New Mexico. Sanctuary documents its subjects’ everyday activities of leisure, sex, gardening and personal archiving, emphasising the practices of care and cultivation with which queer people have secured community within an all-too-hostile culture. In a cultural moment marked by queer assimilation, Ashby foregrounds the necessity of refuge, spaces for intimacy, vulnerability, and sex that can function as shelters for social imagination, until, as Larkin himself laments, “such time as the entire planet is recognised as a sanctuary.”

Content Warning: 

This exhibition contains nudity and explicit descriptions of sex. Parental and viewer discretion is advised. If you have any questions please contact us at info@sanmeigallery.co.uk

Further information

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Sanctuary is commissioned by San Mei Gallery, with support from Arts Council England and the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Alexi Marshall:
A Return to Innocence

Alexi Marshall creates mosaics made with glass tiles and excess wooden substrate sourced from local carpenters. Taking an intuitive approach which leans into the subconscious to explore what may arise, Marshall’s mosaics are bold images acting like snapshots or motifs, with words and symbols that come to the surface.

A Return To Innocence offers a return to the playfulness of art-making; to the images and symbols that always remain in the psyche, and to unquestioned intuition as a source of creativity, allowing the images to weave a story themselves.

Alexi Marshall's exhibition will be the seventh exhibition in San Mei Gallery’s public-facing window space, home to a new commercial programming strand presenting micro-exhibitions with works available for sale by emerging contemporary artists.

Further information

Drinks kindly provided by Brixton Brewery.

For further information about this event, please visit our website.