Alicedelic Collages: Fit 7: Metamorphosis - Jan Švankmajer

Fit 7: Metamorphosis

Jan Švankmajer
(Czech Republic, 2006)
Collages and illustrated book

Svankmajer

"Alice, or Něco z Alenky, is an astonishing movie by the master Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer. Most characters were interpreted by machinery, socks, clay sculptures, odd and antique dolls and toys, meat, even skeletons and bodies of taxidermy. Švankmajer also works in other media, including collages and assemblages with a vast scope of found material. He also illustrated both Alice books, published in two rare Japanese editions. His pictures mix found imagery, drawings and paintings, proposing new mysteries and paradoxes along a dense and intense surrealist journey.

In the artist’s pictures Alice finds herself inserted into an imaginary jungle of sphinxes and chimeras, among collages with multiple identities that emerged from subterranean, strange, and archaic worlds. Bodies were mounted and dismounted, metamorphosing between images of biology, botany and mineralogy, dolls, Victorian illustrations, textures, mutating cells, and sex symbols. Alice’s body was unstable and mutating, a portmanteau of her becomings."

Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation by Adriana Peliano

Alices by Švankmajer

  Fabulous monsters

Alice went to visit the Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer, who illustrated the two Alice books in two rare and strange Japanese editions. His drawings went beyond the limits of conventional illustrations, creating unexpected relationships between pictures and conversations. They are collages that reinvent the world imagined by Lewis Carroll, proposing new mysteries and paradoxes along a surrealist journey.

Metamorphosis in surrealism became a violent and animalistic need, straining the limits of human nature. Life is a dream. The surrealist monsters showed Alice that subjectivity was not that safe and stable place that she had been made to believe. Alice found herself inserted into an imaginary jungle of sphinxes and chimeras, among collages with multiple identities that emerged from subterranean, strange, and archaic worlds. The drawings were mounted and dismounted, metamorphosing between images of biology and botany, dolls, Victorian illustrations, and sex symbols—double, multiple transformations.

 Jan Švankmajer / Wonderland

 Jan Švankmajer / Wonderland

In the Jabberwocky’s portmanteau words, there was a bestiary of beings such as toves and mome raths. Word collages were turned by Švankmajer into monster collages, hybrid and enigmatic beings. Alice’s body was unstable and mutating, a puzzle without any right answer. Alice is a portmanteau of impossibilities. When the caterpillar asks Alice, Who are you?, Švankmajer’s Alice is a drawing, a doll, a mushroom, lace, texture, pulse. The caterpillar and Alice meet with a vital élan, filled with the power of becoming.

Alice continued along and watched fragments of Švankmajer’s experimental animated film that revealed unsuspected dimensions of herself. Much of the animation was created through an explosive mixture of stop motion and a wide variety of surreal objects and hybrid, bizarre bodies. The characters might be played by machines, socks, clay, antique dolls and toys, meat, and even skeletons and the remains of bodies used in taxidermy experiments. The settings were ruins: decadent, subterranean landscapes, transformed into a somber and dissolute atmosphere.

 Jan Švankmajer / Wonderland

Švankmajer adapted Carroll’s story according to a personal dialogue with the dream world and his own childhood: a world inhabited by desires, latent sexuality, fears, anxieties, mysteries, and obsessions. We are also confronted with our own childhood, our own Alices, fears, and shadows: inner alchemies. Each time we watch the film, we dream anew and Alice becomes a different one, among silences and whispers. I am reminded of the letter Paulo Mendes Campos gave to his daughter, Maria de Graça, when she turned fifteen and received Alice as a present: This book is crazy, Maria, the meaning is inside of you.

 Jan Švankmajer / Wonderland

Jan Švankmajer / Looking Glass

Alicedelic Collages: Fit 8: Curiouserism - Adriana Peliano

Fit 8: Curiouserism

Adriana Peliano

(Brasil, 2011-2015)

 Digital collages and book illustrations.

Alice edição comemorativa. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2015.
adrianapeliano.blogspot.com.br

 

 Adriana Peliano

"I have being working with alicedelic collages since my youth, and last year had the opportunity to illustrate both of Alice’s adventures for the second time, published as a double-sided, magic book.

For each of the books I developed a different logic and poetic strategy. Wonderland was created as a mathemagic game. Tenniel’s pictures are disassembled and recombined with images from several other artists, inviting the reader to go beyond the story and amplify listening to the nonsense, the language games, and the fertility of possible alicedelic senses. The choices of the artists who interact and play with Tenniel were driven by the dynamics between dreams and logic as determinants in Lewis Carroll’s enigmagic universe.

Artists who venture into the world of dreams or surrealism, as Bosch, Dalí, Piero Fornasetti, and Magritte, are part of this game inhabiting worlds of dreams within dreams. Another team of modern and contemporary artists present here contributes astonishing geometries and calls for a new relationship between nonlinear time and space. Escher, Shigeo Fukuda, and Penrose, challenge and invite us to believe in the impossible, as did the White Queen. Op artists such as Bridget Riley allow stationary images to seem to run, as in Alice’s race with the Red Queen. The result is a series of puzzles and riddles, making the pages a sequence of doors, but the key you must find yourself.

lice is still an amazing enigma: paradox, nonsense, a multifaceted game of mirrors. Alice in the Sky with Diamonds, the girl with kaleidoscopic eyes shines between a logical and a magical world. Alice’s dreams dive into the source of creativity and challenge the boundaries of the possible. Gardens of delights can bloom as we wander in woods where things have no names, flow in the river of metamorphosis, dive in the unknown, believe in impossible things, follow paradoxical and corkscrew paths, make deals with fabulous monsters, become a friend of Time, follow our own path into the most beautiful garden and trust in our own inventions. Alicinations make a call to face the deviations and madness, the unusual and unpredictable living in each of us."

Adriana Peliano

Blog adrianapeliano

 

Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation by Adriana Peliano
This lecture was presented at the cellebration of the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland  by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. New York, 2015.

 alice150.com

Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation - introduction

Adriana Peliano 

How puzzling all these changes are! 

 I’m never sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to another. 

"Alice was raised on a ship of dreams, in a liquid looking-glass, following the currents of desire, imagination, and curiosity. She was born on a river, with its movements and mirror reflections, following the flow of waters and free associations.

The great paradox running through Alice’s adventures, according to Gilles Deleuze, is the loss of her own name, her infinite identity, her eternal becoming. When the caterpillar asks, Who are you? Alice does not know the answer. I know who I was . . . but I think I must have been changed several times since then. The child, born in the River of Heraclitus, learns that transformation is the only constant.

When Alice says that she only knows who she was, it implies that we are also in transformation. And when she was drawn by Sir John Tenniel, a tradition followed. But she is no longer the Victorian Alice, instead she is a living kaleidoscope of all of the possibilities and probabilities. How many artists were driven by the need to overcome the stereotypical imagery, and by the quest for new adventures in expression?

Since the beginning of the last century, each decade, through its different visions, perspectives, styles inventions and magic formulas, created their own Alices. She is, by turns, a sweet and naive girl, a questioning feminist, a perverted child, a mad and bloody serial killer, a drugged adult, a seeker of worlds beyond conscious rainbow, a delirious psychedelicist, a philosophical curiouser-ist, or a shielded warrior, always multiple and mutating. Alice is all of them and none of them, and she opens herself up like the largest kaleidoscope ever seen. Good-bye, feet! 

As the twentieth century progressed, the concept of illustration underwent profound transformations, in dialogue with radical changes happening in all the visual arts. Among other strategies, artists broke down the barriers between the outside world and the experiences of the mind, questioning the idea of a literal and linear approach to illustration, discovering new relationships between texts and pictures. Rather than repeat, they started to provoke and transgress. The present time is filled with paradox and experimentation. Intertextual readings, metalanguage, multiple assemblies, nonlinear narratives, metamorphosis, looking glass monsters. At the end of last century, Alice’s looking-glass shattered into a million pieces, spreading within the collective imagination new meta-Alices in a nonsensical, magical hourglass of alicinations.

In the twentieth century, the Tenniel and Disney canons became source material for metalanguage and intertextuality. With the advent of the digital age, the visual universe of Alice suffered a great impact and a renewal. Collages and manipulations, mixtures of photos, drawings, and digital paintings were some features that would guide new illustrators. But in a forest of symbols overpopulated by software, filters and image banks, in the lack of critical awareness and genuine imagination, collage can quickly deplete into a mechanical, impoverished, decorative uglification game.

In my adventures as an Alice hunter I look for: Alices that destabilize the commonplace, the good taste and the well behaved; Alices that escape from linear paths and dive between the lines; Alices that challenge standards and formulas of representation; Alices that inhabit labyrinths, paradoxes and impossible geometries; Alices with metamorphic and mutant bodies challenging hybrid identities and eroticism; Alices that dive into bizarre nightmares and challenge the frontiers between mind, madness and the unconscious; Alices that journey through the world of dreams and the marvelous, plucking out the heart of her own mystery; Alices still able to surprise!

This journey through Alices in collages and montagistic procedures is organized into eight fits – or alicinations."

Fit 1: Transformation

 Pat Andrea

Fit 2: Intertextuality

Wolfe von Lenkiewicz

Diogo Muñoz

Fit 3: Multiplicity

Jane Pleydell Bouverie

Maggie Taylor

Fit 4: Great Puzzle

 Keneth Rougeau

Fit 5: Strangeling 

Jasmine Becket-Griffith

Fit 6: Identity

Helenbar

Fit 7: Metamorphosis

Jan Švankmajer

Fit 8: Curiouserism

 Antonio Peticov

Adriana Peliano

Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation by Adriana Peliano
This lecture was presented at the cellebration of the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland  by the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. New York, 2015.

 alice150.com

Alicedelic Collages: Fit 4: The Great Puzzle - Kenneth Rougeau

Fit 4: Great Puzzle

Kenneth Rougeau
(EUA, 2009)
Digital collages

Kenneth Rougeau / Quentin Massys / William Adolphe Bougerau 

"Tenniel’s illustrations were revealed by Martin Gardner as intertextual networks with art history, political cartoons, cultural habits, biographical connections, historical landscapes, and a plethora of references to literature, history and science. Rougeau absorbed some of these in figurative scenes, creating fragmented and nonlinear narratives.

Rougeau’s Alices are also a new girl in each picture, creating a character with a multiple and ever-changing identity. The American digital artist mixed photographs by Lewis Carroll of little girls with females depicted by other artists, such as the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and paintings by Bouguereau. These references articulate transformations in the representation of the female body in art history. Cross-stories reveal that reading is always a retelling, more a corkscrew than a path."

More Kenneth Rougeau and Alice

facebook

Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation by Adriana Peliano

Alicedelic Collages: Fit 2: Intertextuality - Wolfe von Lenkiewicz

Fit 2: Intertextuality

Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (UK, 2011)
Oil paintings.

Lenkiewicz, Pablo Picasso and John Tenniel.

  “I have a wonderful idea, let’s change the subject”. 

Wolfe von Lenkiewicz is an English contemporary artist who employs well-known imagery to create startling new forms that appear strangely familiar to the viewer – “re-sequencing” iconic works into contemporary pieces. He creates ambiguous compositions that question the originality of an art work, also deconstructing the hierarchies of art history discourses.

In a powerful series called “I have a wonderful idea, let’s change the subject” Alice is invited to this provoking game. His huge oil paintings are not literal collages, by keep to its principle by merging Tenniel’s pictures with recreations of great paintings by artists such as Michelangelo, Francis Bacon and Picasso. Facing his Tenniel-esque cubist girl, it came into my mind how much Humpty Dumpty’s challenge to Alice can also call a procedure that defies domesticated bodies tied to artistic conventions. These alicedelic pictures reveal its potency in a magnificent and disturbing journey into Alice’s metamorphic body, opening doors for the eternal cycle of death and rebirth, creation and transformation.

more on Alice and Lenkiewicz 

Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation by Adriana Peliano

La damme ovale by Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst

Leonora Carrington, La Dame Ovale/avec sept collages par Max Ernst, 
(Paris, Guy Lévis Mano, 1939), La Débutante, p. 20.

Leonora Carrington, La Dame Ovale/avec sept collages par Max Ernst,

(Paris, Guy Lévis Mano, 1939).

Found at "Digitalis Kitsch Blog" HERE

Lewis Carroll

John Tenniel

Semana passada tive contato com o artigo "Alice dans mythologie surréaliste" de Isabelle Chevrel. Um trecho em especial eu não conseguia compreender pelo obstáculo da língua. Pedi então que minha vizinha Thereza (professora de literatura francesa) traduzisse do francês. Só hoje encontrei essas imagens fascinantes flanando pela internet. Enquanto preparava esse post, minha vizinha bateu na porta. Descobri que o trecho que ela traduzira correspondia exatamente a um comentário sobre essa primeira imagem de Max Ernst.

Nesse artigo que comentei, Isabelle Chevrel aponta uma conexão que presenciamos aqui. Max Ernst possivelmente já conheceria as ilustrações de John Tenniel para Alice quando realizou essa colagem para uma edição de "A dama oval" de Leonora Carrington. Lewis Carroll era um dos escritores favoritos de Max Ernst, que ilustrou ele mesmo algumas obras do autor, entre elas "A caça ao Snark". Na figura apresentada, a menina se encontra com um ser estranho, parte composto por um casulo enigmático. Nos lembramos imediatamente do encontro entre Alice e a lagarta, que se tornaria também crisálida e então borboleta. A transformação da lagarta entretanto, fica apenas como uma promessa, ela não se materializa no livro de Alice. Diante da lagarta, Alice também se estranha, depois de ter se transformado tantas vezes naquele dia, e a transformação se estabelece como o elo decisivo no diálogo em questão. A pergunta da lagarta - quem é você? - aponta aqui para o reconhecimento de uma identidade em trânsito.

Acredito entretanto que seria mais interessante pensar nas ilustrações originais do próprio Lewis Carroll . Ao contrário das ilustrações de Tenniel, adaptadas confortavelmente ao bom gosto e ao senso comum da Inglaterra vitoriana, as ilustrações de Carroll ousam no estranhamento, no elogio à ambiguidade e fazem emergir criaturas híbridas e metamórficas, que sugerem correspondências com os bestiários surrealistas.  Chamo aqui a atenção para um encontro faiscante entre a dama oval dos sonhos de Carrington e Ernst e a lagarta telúrica e onírica dos sonhos de Alice e Carroll.

Será que esse livro que ela segura nas mãos é o livro de "Alice no país das maravilhas"?


In "Alice dans mythologie surreal," Isabelle Chevrel indicates a connection that we witness here. I have already noticed it just before I found her arguments. Max Ernst probably already knew Tenniel's illustrations for Alice when he realized his collages for the edition of "La damme ovale" by Leonora Carrington. Lewis Carroll were one of Ernst's favorite authors and has illustrated some of his books, including "The hunting of the Snark". The girl in the picture above meets a strange being, an hybrid creature with an enigmatic cocoon as a head. It resembles the encounter between Alice and the caterpillar, who will became a chrysalis and then a butterfly. The question of the caterpillar - Who are you? - points to a recognition of an identity in metamorphosis.

I believe, however, that it would be interesting to think about the original illustrations from Lewis Carroll himself. Unlike Tenniel's illustrations, adapted to the good taste of Victorian England, the illustrations of Carroll dare into the unknown, proposing strange and hybrid creatures that bring out correspondences with the Surrealist bestiaries. Here I draw attention to a magic encounter between the oval lady and the caterpillar. Who are you? They question us.

Does this book she holds is "Alice in Wonderland"?

Alicedelic Collages - Fit 1: Transformation - Pat Andrea

Fit 1: Transformation

PAT ANDREA 

(Dutch, 2006)

  Book illustrations.

‘Your face is the same as everybody has—the two eyes, so—’nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance—or the mouth at the top—that would be SOME help.’ ‘It wouldn’t look nice,’ Alice objected. But Humpty Dumpty only shut his eyes and said ‘Wait till you’ve tried.’ 
Looking Glass

"The principle of collage is among the most significant contributions of modern art to contemporary culture. Collage allows an inexhaustible conversation between pictures, challenging the commonplace and our comfort zone. With collages, known pictures are open to free reinvention, promoting poetic strangeness and unexpected associations, daring the concept of originality and authorship. It is not just a group of manual or digital techniques, but a great puzzle. We are faced, then, with a new logic, a call to awaken the alicedelic imagination and enigmagic thinking. The collage is the art of selection and combination, choice, encounter and transformation."

More Alice and Pat Andrea

Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation by Adriana Peliano.

 alice150.com

Alicedelic Collages: Fit 3: Multiplicity - Jane Pleydell Bouverie

Fit 3: Multiplicity
 

Jane Pleydell Bouverie

(UK; 1872 -77) 

Photomontage. 

 Jane Bouverie

"Creating photomontages was a common practice among the women of the Victorian elite. Predominant in these collages are comments on the social rituals, fashion and everyday life, but also fantastic images inspired by fairy tales and comic cartoons. Among these images I found this collage from around 1870, where Jane Bouverie pasted photographs of different children occupying Alice’s places. This procedure would be reinvented by contemporary digital illustrators, highlighting the on going transformation of an Alice who in each figure was a different girl."

Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation by Adriana Peliano

Alicitis

"Siga o coelho. Escorregue pela fresta de uma esquina urbana, suba as escadas e descubra uma nova Alice-Maravilha."

Num prédio estranho no centro de São Paulo, escuro e labiríntico como um filme de David Lynch, aconteceu a esposição ALICIDADE, de 19 a 27 de Maio de 2010. Oito artistas transformaram o espaço através da street art, colagens, pinturas e fotos. Lunkie, Adriana Peliano, Celinha Fink, Luiz Zonzini, Yves Tadeu e Pita, Frederico Pellachin e Satansmothers, revelaram ali novas alicidades. A exposição teve curadoria de Fabiana Caso e Laurence Trille.

As possibilidades abertas pelo mundo da colagem e da street art marcaram os jogos de linguagem que os visitantes da exposição foram convidados a participar. Desenhos, palavras, rabiscos, rasuras, interferências, deslocamentos e diálogos entre rasgos e traços marcaram os fragmentos de Alice deslocados no espaço, num jogo de improváveis conexões e associações inusitadas.

O cadáver delicado é um jogo surrealista inventado na década de 20 do século passado. O jogo podia ser realizado através de textos, desenhos ou colagens e consistia numa criação coletiva em que cada participante inseria um novo elemento numa composição em processo, em geral sem enxergar o que havia sido adicionado antes. Esse é um exercício de descondicionamento da percepção e um desafio à criação de novos mundos.

Alicitis são contaminações de linguagem, transcriações coletivas, jogos esquisitos, corpos desmembrados e reconfigurados em perversos palimpsestos. Uma caixa de supresas, estranhas diversões.

Veja mais sobre o jogo dos cadáveres delicados AQUI e AQUI

 

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION |

Saiba mais sobre a exposição e conheça os artistas que participaram AQUI

In a strange building in downtown São Paulo, dark and labyrinthic as a David Lynch film, the exhibition Alicidade (Alicity) happened from May 19 to 27 of 2010. Eight artists have transformed the space by street art, collages, paintings and photos. Lunkie, Adriana Peliano, Celinha Fink, Luiz Zonzini, Yves Thaddeus, Pita, and Frederick Pellachin Satansmothers participated. The exhibit was curated by Fabiana Caso and Laurence Trille.

The possibilities opened up by the world of street art and collage stimulated the games of language that the visitors were invited to participate. Drawings, words, scribbles, erasures, interference, dislocations, and dialogues between tears and dashes marked the fragments of Alice displaced in space, creating a set of unusual associations.

The exquisite corpse is a funny surrealist game invented in the 20's of last century. The game could be done through text, drawings or collages and consisted of a collective creation in which each participant inserted a new element in a work in progress, often without seeing what had been done before. This exercise challenges the creation and the perception.

Alicitis (the name sounds like a desease) are contaminations of language, transcreations of collective weird games, bodies dismembered and reconfigured in perverse palimpsests. One box of surprises.

Alicedelic Collages: Fit 8: Curiouserism - Antonio Peticov

Fit 8: Curiouserism

Antonio Peticov
(Brasil, 1998-2014)
Oil paintings.

 Antonio Peticov

Curiouser and curiouser. 

"Antonio Peticov is a Brazilian visual artist with a huge output in many media, with emphasis in painting. He works as a voracious “anthropophagist,” a Brazilian cultural concept that understands national identity as a process of devouring and recreating foreign culture. Peticov feeds himself with a vast and fertile repertoire of art history, pop visual references, philosophy and science, promoting an encounter of surrealism, psychedelicism, science, logic and mathematics. His large Tenniel-esque oil paintings propose puzzles from provocative artists and scientists such as Escher, Penrose, Edgard Rubin, and others among classical pictures of impossible geometry, visual illusions, paradoxes, surrealist objects and other curiouser-isms."

 Antonio Peticov

www.peticov.com.br

 

Alicedelic Collages: Pictures in Conversation by Adriana Peliano

Adriana Peliano in “diálogos e insólitas figurações” (“dialogues and unusual figurations”)

 

“Adriana Peliano, a young Brazilian artist and president of the Lewis Carroll Society of Brazil, through fragments, collages, montages, mandalas, metamorphoses and assemblages awakens an attractive inventory of magicians and multiple universes of visual art, reinventing everyday logic, proposing new meanings through language games, inserting the interlocutor into dream labyrinths. From Alice and her adventures, expanded through readings and re-readings that have taken place over the years, Peliano has been composing a critical repertoire of creativity in priceless works. 

In 2011, the Brazilian artist was responsible for the translation, typography, and graphic design of Alice’s Adventures under Ground, the manuscript by Carroll, published in Brazil; later she illustrated Alice books such as the 150th anniversary edition by Editora Zahar, which brought together in a single volume Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. The first image of the mosaic, the White Rabbit, is one of the illustrations in this book. 

In her latest book, Alice in Seven Keys published in 1921 in Portuguese by A Mascote Editora and in English by Underline Publishing, Peliano invites us on a journey through several labyrinthine spaces, where keys are offered to open portals and face unusual and dreamlike settings. Spaces in which our gaze undergoes constant “surrealicedelic” metamorphoses, as we perceive ourselves in gardens of dreams, in which imagination, and creative and critical inventiveness propel us through fragments of universes that connect to our existential questions. 

The work is analogous to a game in which, when playing with possibilities that “move in fractals of infinity like the largest alicescope ever seen!”, the reader begins to navigate through a work woven with threads to be woven through dialogues between languages (verbal, visual and sound), between literature and the visual arts. Peliano’s production, of her singular aesthetic with its collages and interventions, defiantly brings us reverberations of figures by John Tenniel and Gertrude Thomson—who illustrated the original Alice books—and paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, Marx Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and Monet, just to name a few. The verbal, in this text, gains iconic configurations in analogy with keys: portal keys, reading keys, dream keys, etc. The book, lends its materiality to design for the composition of enigmatic narrativity. 

In this work by Peliano, we are faced with a contemporary scriptural form that takes place as a process of disarticulation of all pretensions to the universal, of all rituals for the demarcation of powers and glories. In this way, a literature is created in the intertwining of different arts, from different discursive planes, out of any order or way that monopolizes time, space and imagination, reverberating expanded elaborations that can harbor complexity. As in her dream, Alice, assuming unusual figurations, certainly imagined herself into this book.” 

 Maria Zilda da Cunha in. “diálogos e insólitas figurações”.

Imagens em migrações poéticas: miradas potenciais. São Paulo: FFLCH/USP, 2021. 

FONTE

Tradução: Adriana Peliano 

Alice and the Seven Keys

 

 

Recycled Alice by Patty Van Dorin

“Alice books’ enduring power and appeal may very well lie in the fact that,

 like dreams, 

they can mean whatever the readers need them to mean”. 

 Carolyn Sigler 

from

All images by Patty Van Dorin.

 Patty Van Dorin 

I just found these  collages of Patty Van Dorin, recreating Alice's adventures in altered wonderlands.

Trought collages Alice becomes a path that purposes multiple looking glasses that we can go through.
Displacements and unpredictable associations open doors to dreamlands. 

Alice becomes a portmanteau of possibilities. 

Every Alice lover could try to do the same, creating a its own altered Alice.
 Taking the risk to begin finding Alice everywhere! 

More Alices in collagelands

"Alice and the Seven Keys - a Pharmacopeia of Creativity" written & illustrated by Adriana Peliano

 Comments by Semper Lux*

source

 "Alice and the Seven Keys - a Pharmacopeia of Creativity"

published ‎in 2021 by @amascoteeditora (Portuguese) @underlinepublishing (English)

During the start of the pandemic in 2020, Peliano used Carroll's characters to come up with an idea to improve our humdrum lives: through seven "keys", we can use Alice "potions" to transform any situation.

"In Alice and the Seven Keys, Adriana Peliano accompanies you on a journey, exploring your creativity by means of games, magical elixirs, & her resplendent collages. Lovers of Alice, fantasy, fairy tales, and dreams will be enchanted." 

Mark Burstein, President Emeritus The Lewis Carroll Society of North America 

She lists these 7 potions using her signature metamorphic collages:

1: Cover: Alice moves 7 times. The number is significant: 

7 is the only prime number preceding a cube.

7 is the Aliquot sum of 8, & is the base of the 7-Aliquot tree.

7 is the only dimension, besides 3, in which a vector cross product can be defined.

7 is the lowest dimension of a known exotic sphere

 

2: Alice wears her Max Ernst thinking cap, like the Hogwarts Sorting Hat, & decides her fate by choosing which door to open

 

3: Metamorphic elixir 1: "Alicescopic Curiouserism". Ingredients: Petals of Alicedelic Perplexity. Flame of burning curiosity. Attraction to the unknown. Make-believe yeast. High dose of initiative. Invitation from the universe

4: "Logiclock Time": Petals of Alicedelic Tac Tic. Antidote of pointless pointer. Spirals of peace & love with time. Lushness of now. Synchronicity activator. Serendipity liquor

5: "Alicinatic Travel Formula": Petals of Magicomic Delusions. Soluble memories of a storyteller. Water from the river where Alice was born. Labyrinthine Footsteps. Mary Poppins wind. Lucid dreams

6: "Alicedelic Metamorflower": Petals of Alicedelic Chrysalices. Butterfly Breath Medicinalis. Smoke from transflowermations. Alchemical cocoons. Much room

 

 

 

7: "Flowersophical Madness": Petals of Alicinatory Folly. Extract of stone of madness. Flowersophical paradoxes. Tea of thinking differently. Vision of the invisible. Magic from a Mad Hat

8: "Mathematical Games": Petals of Alicinaris ludens. Tincture of white & red roses. Wrap of porte-manteaux. Sine qua nonsense extract. Vitaminutes of Impossible geometries. Paradoxical paregoric

 

9: At the end, do you arrive at the peaceful Giverny garden of Claude Monet?

 

10: Or at the false paradise of earthly pleasures of Hieronymus Bosch?  Swim in the bath of Venus, but look, the fountain is cracked, this garden of Lust & Vice is ephemeral, & will not satisfy you for long

 

 

 

"This is the panel from which the title Garden of Earthly Delights was derived. Here Bosch’s humans, the offspring of Adam and Eve, gambol freely in a surrealistic paradisiacal garden, appearing as mad manifestations of a whimsical creator—sensate cogs of nature alive in a larger, animate machine. It is a matter of divided opinion as to what, exactly, the humans are actually doing in this delightful, dense and nonsensical landscape, alive with a dizzying array of some of Bosch’s most delectable creatures and dotted with his alembic architecture. It is almost as though he imagined the world of creation as a terrific Willy Wonka series of machines with humans as their product." Dr. Sally Hickson

Adriana Peliano: "What could happen to the inhabitants of Wonderland after that strange collective nightmare. The scare over, they would open the door to a new world and a transformed life. Alice would learn to remain calm in the face of challenges and conflicts. The Rabbit relaxed inside his hole without a clock and would no longer be late. He was going to have tea with the Hatter, the Impossible, and Time itself. Then the Queen of Hearts would emerge. She would finally lose her mind and embrace the Heart. The butterfly would come out of the cocoon and go on a journey of self-knowledge. The Cat would invite the new to happen, traveling in imagination with a wide, lunatic smile." 

 

 

STORIES 

 

 

 

 

Semper Lux is an enigmatic entity, witty collector and presenter of precious and supercalifragilistic illustrated books, with a great  research and full of unsuspected references, who created its own Alicedelic Alixir and to curiosity, madness, journey, dream, game, transformation, added to our time the 8th key: Fun!

 

Follow on instagram: @semperluxus