The Semi-Tropic Spiritualist Guidebook, brings together images, texts, excerpts of performance scripts, and printed ephemera from the Semi-Tropic Spiritualist’s previous exhibitions. The book is organized as both a record of the project’s Test Sites from 2012-2018, and as an idiosyncratic guidebook to California’s spiritual history and geography.
Semi-Tropic Spiritualists began in 2012 as an ongoing series of performance works, objects and illustrated texts by Los Angeles-based artists Astri Swendsrud and Quinn Gomez-Heitzeberg. Their works explore the history of spiritual belief and metaphysical practice in Los Angeles through the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, an organization that created a campsite meeting place outside the city limits of Los Angeles in 1905. Spiritualism has described itself as a science, a philosophy and a religion. The artists are interested in this system as a model for examining ideas of faith and skepticism, belief and charlatanism, as well as for the development of a space dedicated to investigation and the search for knowledge.
The Semi-Tropic Spiritualists have exhibited their installations and performance works at Richard Telles Fine Art, Klowden Mann, The Vincent Price Museum, and Chime & Co. in Los Angeles; Shangri-La, Joshua Tree, CA; and Llano del Rio, CA among other locations. Their work will also be part of the upcoming exhibition Totenpass at Visitor Welcome Center, Los Angeles, in October 2018. Both artists received their MFAs from CalArts in 2008.
