“Our collaborative project entitled Run O’ The River / Bitter Medicine is a printmaking odyssey and book expedition through psychedelic terrain. Visionary poems, drawings, schematic assemblages, instant aura-reading photographs and encoded glyphs congeal to reveal psychic and hypnagogic micro-climates. We offer a guided meditation, presented in media res, on the realization of simple truths—to open a window into a deeper relationship with our surroundings.
Visually,_ Run O’ The River / Bitter Medicine_ embeds hard-won esoteric knowledge in a mapping of internal landscapes. Drawing on personal experience and interaction with place, our interests collide creating fissures, oblique intersections and ambiguous storytelling that both hides and reveals an intricately woven yet frayed environment. Using a direct but persistent devotional code we have reprogrammed our mark-making voices, working collaboratively and spontaneously, collecting and generating information to arrive at a knotty mixed-media synthesis.
In this moment, on the cusp of widening medicinal and recreational adoption of psilocybin, flexibility, instinct and intuition have been our chosen guides. Our tools are digital, machine age and ‘primitive.’
Within lies spacecraft language, two toilers’ take on no-zones cultivated through technical experimentation, not hesitating to get dirt under our fingernails. Run O’ The River / Bitter Medicine sets out on a naturalist-adaptationist voyage into brutal, implacable terrain, as difficult to subdue as the wind, piercing gaps in the gates of perception with pure oxygen.”
— Linda Zeb Hang and Keith Graham
