Semi-Tropic Spiritualist Guidebook

<p><em>The Semi-Tropic Spiritualist Guidebook</em> 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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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 <em>Totenpass </em>at Visitor Welcome Center Los Angeles in October 2018. Both artists received their MFAs from CalArts in 2008.</p>