The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) presents

CAMERON: SONGS FOR THE WITCH WOMAN

from October 11, 2014 to January 11, 2015 at MOCA Pacific Design Center. Organized by guest curator Yael Lipschutz, the exhibition will be the largest survey of CAMERON’s work since 1989 and will include approximately 91 artworks and ephemeral artifacts. Alma Ruiz, Senior Curator at MOCA is the coordinating curator.

 

The exhibition will include pieces formerly thought to be lost, ranging from early paintings, to drawings, sketchbooks, and poetry from her late years, as well as ephemera and correspondence with individuals such as her husband, JACK PARSONS (1914-1952).

 

 

 

 

CAMERON (Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel, 1922-1995) emerged in the mid-1940s as an artist, performer, poet, and occult practitioner in Los Angeles. Born in Belle Plaine, Iowa, MARJORIE CAMERON (who would reject her first name as an adult) arrived in Hollywood after serving in the navy during World War II. Settling first in Pasadena and working as a fashion illustrator, in 1946 she met her first husband, JACK PARSONS, a rocket scientist and cofounder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who followed the esoteric mysticism of ALEISTER CROWLEY. The two soon married, their mystical bond transforming CAMERON’s life and art.

 
 

 

 

 

 

A visionary painter and unparalleled draftsman whose work evokes Latin American and European surrealism, CAMERON rendered mythological figures with a singular attention to line and the idea of spiritual metamorphosis. Her philosophical explorations soon brought her into contact with Los Angeles’s beatnik and avant-garde film circles, and the unorthodoxy and breadth of her interests made her a unique link between the city’s flourishing spiritual and art worlds.

 

Over the following decades she dedicated herself to her art and mysticism while mentoring younger artists and poets such as Aya (Tarlow), Wallace Berman, George Herms, and David Meltzer. The first survey of CAMERON’s work since her passing in 1995, this exhibition reveals the seminal role she played within the development of Los Angeles’s midcentury counterculture.

 

 

CAMERON: SONGS FOR THE WITCH WOMAN
October 11, 2014 to January 11, 2015
MOCA
Pacific Design Center

 
 

The Cameron-Parsons Foundation, Inc.

 

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ROSALEEN NORTON (September 10, 2014)
Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome (1954) by KENNETH ANGER (November 6, 2010)

A Very British Witchcraft
Channel 4, UK, 2012, 46 min

The extraordinary story of Britain’s fastest-growing religious group – the modern pagan witchcraft of Wicca – and of its creator, an eccentric Englishman called GERALD GARDNER.

Historian and leading expert in Pagan studies Professor RONALD HUTTON explores Gardner’s story and experiences first-hand Wicca’s growing influence throughout Britain today.

Born of a nudist colony in 1930s Dorset, Wicca rapidly grew from a small New Forest coven to a worldwide religion in the space of just 70 years.

It’s a journey that takes in tales of naked witches casting spells to ward off Hitler, tabloid hysteria about human sacrifices and GERALD GARDNER himself appearing on Panorama.

geraldgardner.com

 

Legend Of The Witches
Alexander Sanders, UK, 1970, 72 min

 

 

The history of witchcraft in Britain

 

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Regards sur l’occultisme (1965) de GUY L. CÔTÉ (February 5, 2014)
The Power of the Witch (1971) by OLIVER HUNKIN (December 5, 2013)
Witches & Wicked Bodies (August 26, 2013)
Häxan (1922) by BENJAMIN CHRISTENSEN (June 20, 2013)
The Occult Experience (1985) by FRANK HEIMANS (January 13, 2012)
Angeli Bianchi… Angeli Neri (1969) by LUIGI SCATTINI (March 25, 2011)
The Occult : Revival of Evil (198?) by DAVE HUNT (January 31, 2011)
The Museum of Icelandic Sorcery & Witchcraft in Hólmavík, Iceland (November 11, 2010)
The Museum Of Witchcraft in Boscastle (UK) in the late 1960′s (June 28, 2010)
The Burning Times (1990) by DONNA READ (January 4, 2010)