Can a Session With a Medium Spark Creativity? These Artists Gave It a Try, and You Can See the Results in a New Show

Artists draw inspiration for their work all over the place—from
the news, from friends and family, from dreams. Now, a new group
show organized by Brooklyn artist Michael Hambouz has tasked
artists with creating pieces in response to a session with a
medium, encouraging them to take advantage of the insights offered
through clairvoyance. The entire process, perhaps unsurprisingly,
was filled with eerie coincidences and fortuitous events.

“I wanted to give artists a new experience that would inspire
them to make new work—or maybe they would think it was crazy and
they were skeptical about the whole thing, and would provide a lot
of inspiration to make work in completely new direction,” Hambouz
said.

It’s actually the second show Hambouz has done in collaboration
with psychic, medium, and spiritual advisor Hank Hivnor. The first,
“Mediums,” at Greenpoint’s Calico Gallery in 2015, was such a
success that both men were inspired to include work of their own
this time around, at Queens’s Lorimoto Gallery.

A painter himself, Hivnor finds that many of his clients are
artists or fashion designers hoping, in part, for an extra creative
boost—which is how he initially crossed paths with Hambouz. Their
first session was something of a revelation.

“Hank picked up on things, including, verbatim, a new idea I’d
written in a sketchbook about a year back and forgotten about,”
Hambouz recalled. “I wound up doing that painting series, and it
sold out.”

Last year, Hambouz got thinking about the project again when a
theme for a local art fair seemed as if drawn from his “Mediums”
press release. That day, he got a text from Hivnor, who he hadn’t
spoken to in a year or two. They immediately set about planning
round two, enlisting Margot Bird, Milton Carter, Maya Hayuk, Kelly
Medford, John Orth, Mike Paré, and Rebecca Reeve to take part.

“The first show was so profound,” Hivnor told Artnet News. “It’s
about tuning into that what really inspires people and getting the
artists to focus on that.”

So, what is a session with Hivnor like? In preparation for this
story, I met with him for an hour, which began with the medium
reciting a pathway prayer to open the Akashic records, said to
be compendium of all human events and thoughts past, present,
and future. “I can look at anything in your life that you want to
know about that you don’t have access to,” he offered.

“You’ve had other lives where you were keeping track of
information for a living,” Hivnor told me. “Before you go somewhere
to interview somebody, you send out a part of yourself ahead of
time that opens up the energy, so when you arrive there
everything’s more relaxed and the information pours out of them.
That’s a really interesting technique that you’ve developed.”

He told me that it seemed like I wanted to embark on a big
project—my long-term goal is to write a book—and that orange was my
power color. “I’m really obsessed with color,” Hivnor added. “I
believe that it has healing powers and also influences our
emotional states.”

Hivnor’s intuition often leads him to engage with art that the
creator has forgotten about or dismissed. On a visit to Hambouz’s
studio in preparation for the exhibition, Hivnor ignored the
carefully arrayed works set out for his review, instead digging
deep into a stack of pieces that had been set aside. “He pulled
this painting out that I had done in 2012 of a woman,” said
Hambouz. “He asked, ‘Who is this person? This person was
terrible to you!’”

Sure enough, he was right. The subject of the painting was a
donor to a local arts nonprofit that Hambouz had agreed to paint in
exchange for her donation to the organization. But she demanded
several changes to the work and ultimately reneged on the agreement
to purchase it. “It was a bad enough experience that I was hiding
the painting even,” said Hambouz. “I’ve made a lot of alterations
to reclaim it, and it’s got me excited about revisiting
figurative work, which I’ve done for 20 years.”

Once he had completed his own contribution, Hambouz’s biggest
concern in organizing the show was whether or not it would make any
sense together. In the end, he realized, there was no need to
worry: “Somehow this magical connection between all the work
resonated both times around!”

See more works from the exhibition below.

“Mediums II” is on view at Lorimoto Gallery, 1623 Hancock
Street, Ridgewood, Queens, New York, October 19–November 10,
2019.

The post Can a Session With a Medium Spark Creativity? These
Artists Gave It a Try, and You Can See the Results in a New
Show appeared first on artnet News.