Arizona 10 (2021) by Brian Maguire in Natural Mystics at The Warehouse, Dallas. 

Art is never reasonable. It is not logical and has no utilitarian value. In a world obsessed with efficiency, the role of the artist is to introduce friction. The artists in Natural Mystics employ magical and otherworldly thinking that gum-up the works and create this productive friction. Drawing from both the Rachofsky and the Hartland & Mackie / Labora Collections, the exhibition gathers works made in the shadow of the wreckage of empirical reason, at a time when the systems we were taught to trust have proven to be unreliable narrators of the present moment. The artists in the exhibition do not offer solutions, nor do they turn away from the present moment’s poverty and exhaustion. Instead, they turn upward and inward. Across a variety of media—from paintings to aquariums—they work from places beneath language and beyond the reach of consensus. In an age intoxicated by data and driven to rationalize every impulse, these artists choose instead to listen…to dreams, to omens, to the quiet murmur beneath the noise. Theirs is a different kind of rigor: one that resists legibility, that honors opacity, that draws from what cannot be charted. This is a queer knowledge-making. It does not justify itself. It offers ephemera as evidence.

As Natural Mystics unfolds, the artists reckon with the world on different terms: intuitive, embodied, non-linear, organic. They operate as seers, not because they foretell the future, but because they feel and share what has been buried and what is becoming—climate collapse, algorithmic control, new understandings of the body, the disenchantment of life. These artists draw power from ancestral memory, the natural world, and ecstatic vision. What they offer is not escape, but spell work: gestures that resist commodification and truths that cannot be graphed. Here, art is not a mirror held to the world, but a portal—something to pass through and be changed by.