Collection: "ATOMS," organized by Diego Leclery (online exhibition)

About the exhibition

Everybody freaked out on acid. You’ve read a bunch of different things. You’re into Hinduism now. There’s a truth underlying all religions, and even though you’re more into Hinduism, you try to relate. It's easier that way.

When you look at the world, you can now breathe with it. You see yourself with it: you are the world, you are the universe. The thought doesn’t occur to you: you wander into the thought instead; it was always here, it is also of the universe.

You feel this world as one, including the doubts, and you can call the way your face feels when it’s part of this world and a breeze or warmth touches it beautiful. It has light in it, and people’s faces are now also full of light. A jar is too, a cat, a pot, a puddle, and not just the faces of things, but that’s all you have to go by, and it’s enough for now. It's a lot.

Something unpleasant happens (maybe a feeling of not-enoughness or too-muchness). It’s not a funny feeling, but you can't help laugh anyway. You’re not laughing at the unpleasantness, you’re laughing at how marvelous it feels interacting with the unexpected. Not knowing is fun. The unknown is an enjoyable feeling.

You forget yourself, and you feel like you float when you walk and your bones have no weight. You feel perhaps kind of dumb being so richly aware of just being. You can see a part of you doesn’t trust this, but it’s far away, like someone waving from a distance, and it’s OK that it’s there. It’s not like you “trust” this either, at least not as much as that voice wants you to; you know that degree of certainty is a form of holding the world, expecting it to conform to your needs, and fit in your hand, and that’s not something you want to be doing right now, it’s too much muscle, too much thinking.

You can know that desire is there, though, and anyway, what you want is to be caught in a breeze, not nested in someone’s hands. You want to let go and let everything in the world dazzle. 

About the organizer

Diego Leclery is an artist living in Queens, New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include One with Everything at Cincinatti's BasketShop gallery; Household Name: A Ten-Year Survey of Diego Leclery’s Self-Portraiture in Chicago’s Artist-Run Spaces and Apartment Galleries at the Hyde Park Art Center; and the annual Sit on a Polar Bear's Lap event at 4th Ward Project Space, both in Chicago. Leclery was selected to participate in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He is one of the founding members of the artist-run space Julius Caesar in Chicago.