Kadar Brock: the purple rose ashram of the new age

Over the last decade Kadar Brock’s practice has been engaged in an ongoing act of contemplative erasure. A self reflective process of recording imagery and eradicating it, continuously, over and over again, in an attempt to make sense of the fractured reality that is memory, formative experience, and the kaleidoscope of imagery our minds record as lived experience. In recent years, Brock has been diving into the history of a new age cult known as The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA), and its founder John-Roger Hinkins, through research and pilgrimages to various sites throughout the country. This research and interest point deeper into Brock’s past, his upbringing within the cults’ teachings and its community, and his memories of this chapter of his life. While the work itself isn’t entirely about MSIA or its founder, John-Roger’s claim to be “The Mystical Traveler”, an all-knowing being that incarnates every generation to share its spiritual wisdom, does engage Brocks’ interest in how memory and identity are formed. How every layer of sediment in the composed bedrock of our identity is a chapter of information, mashed together; a totality made up of many collisions and revisions scattered through time. 

KADAR BROCK (b. 1980, New York, NY) is a New York based artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Brock received his BFA from the Cooper Union School of Arts, NY in 2002.

Recent solo and two person exhibitions include the purple rose ashram of the new age (2022), PATRON, Chicago, IL; Belief in a Disenchanted World (2022), Mother Gallery, New York, NY; bury enchantment (2019), PATRON Projects | New York, New York, NY; summon artifact (2017), PATRON, Chicago IL; gifts ungiven (2016), Vigo Gallery, London, UK; Cast With Flashback Cast With Flashback (2015), Almine Rech, Brussels; Unburial Rites, (2015), Vigo Gallery, London, UK; scry 2 (2014), Gallery Diet, Miami, FL; and dredge (2013), The Hole, New York, NY. Selected group exhibitions include: From Confucius to Christ (2022), Yeh Art Gallery, St. John’s University, Jamaica, NY; SITE: Art and Architecture in the Digital Space (2020), Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; In Pursuit of a Meaningful Mark (2020), Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; PATRON (2019),NADA Miami, Miami, FL; VIGO Gallery (2019), Untitled, Miami, FL; 9999 (2018), The Fireplace Project, East Hampton, NY; Wall Space (2018), NY(G), Brooklyn, NY; 12 x 12, 2016 (2017), Black Ball Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Though You’ve Hit a Bump(2017), 315 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Cause The Grass Don’t Grow and The Sky Ain’t Blue (2016), Praz Delavallade, Paris, France; Theory of Forms (2015), PATRON, Chicago, IL; Space and Matter (2015), Sperone Westwater, New York, NY; New Vibrations (2015), Brand New Gallery, Milano, IT; Surface Tension (2015), Flag Foundation, New York, NY; Summertime(2015), Galerist, Istanbul, TR; Brand New Second Hand (2014), Vigo Gallery, London, UK; and The Example (2013), Bleecker Street Arts Club, New York, NY. Recently, Brock was an artist in residence at Palazzo Monti in Brescia, Italy and has an upcoming residency at CCA Andratx, Center for Contemporary Art in Mallorca Spain.

Image: Kadar Brock, bolshevik pete's, mutual tipple, you never heard, 2021, Oil on canvas