On Saturday, February 21st, downtown Los Angeles’ Corey Helford Gallery (CHG) will proudly unveil a new solo show from figurative painter Adrian Cox, titled The well of dreams, in the Main Gallery.

The studio practice for the Los Angeles-based artist and compelling storyteller involves crafting an intricate and epic mythology with his paintings, in which he explores questions of identity, spirituality, and our relationship with the natural world. In creating his work, Cox draws inspiration from art history, science fiction, mythic archetypes, and his own experience of growing up in a closeted queer family. Featuring over twenty new works, The well of dreams marks Cox’s fifth solo exhibition at CHG, following The brush and the torch (June 2023), Dream country (Sept. 2021), Into the spirit garden (Mar. 2020), and Terra incognita (Feb. 2018). Leading up to the show’s opening, Cox is sharing in-studio videos, providing a sneak peek into some of his new works.

Regarding his work, Cox says, “My paintings are connected by a mythic narrative set in a world that I call the Borderlands. For over a decade, I've cultivated this internal landscape and used my paintings to give it form. Each image that I create is an exploratory step leading deeper into a territory that exists at the threshold of the real and the imagined, the physical world and the world of dreams. The protagonists of the mythology that I've created are beings known as Border creatures. These creatures are, both physically and spiritually, an extension of the landscape that they inhabit. Their anatomy combines human traits with those of the Borderlands, and they serve as caretakers of their wilderness home. These strange but peaceful creatures are artists, gardeners, poets, scientists, and mystics. When they dream, the landscape dreams with them. The Border creatures are antagonized by the Specters, blue spirits of pure energy. These spirits casually burn the landscape that they walk upon and are alienated from the world that they inhabit. The Specters perceive that which is other as a threat, or as a resource reducible to its usefulness. The war between the Border creatures and Specters is a conflict between two distinct ways of being in the world.”

Regarding his upcoming show, the artist shares: “This exhibition tells the story of Maker, a sculptor whose hand was pierced by a Specter's arrow while opening a portal into the void. This injury, known as the Cosmic Wound, poisoned Maker and blackened their hand. When Maker was unable to heal themself by conventional means, the other Border creatures devised a ritual to guide their wounded friend through the Labyrinth of unknowing and into the dreamworld. In The well of dreams, Maker's inward pilgrimage becomes a mystical quest to find a cure for the Cosmic wound. Their journey takes them through spiritual wastelands and haunted forests of the mind, until at last they find what they seek: the heart of dreams from which all creativity flows. This sacred source of the imagination gives Maker the strength not to heal the Cosmic wound, but to transfigure it into something powerful and life-affirming.

As I've worked on this exhibition, Maker's dream quest has increasingly mirrored my own surrealist ventures into the depths. The paintings in this show incorporate symbolic language drawn forth from the subconscious, and as such, my process has become increasingly experimental. For many of these works, I constructed narratives using a variation of the cut-up technique, in which I pulled scraps of sentences randomly from a bag and then arranged them into a story. The text fragments that I used for this process were sourced from numerous books that included several versions of the Arthurian Holy Grail quest as well as my own dream journals. I created other paintings from imagery that I discovered during active imagination sessions, a meditative daydreaming technique. In these sessions, I sat before an altar adorned with symbols from my work while listening to soundscapes that I created to evoke the Borderlands. These experimental approaches to my process have allowed me to treat imaginative play as an act of sacred magic. With this exhibition, I've sought to treat creative invention as a spiritually vital way of interacting with the world, of giving it meaning and soul.

The Well of dreams is an exploration of the nature and source of creativity. The story that unfolds in this exhibition suggests the importance of cultivating internal imaginal landscapes and depicts spiritual development as an engagement with the world rather than a departure from it. Ultimately, however, I created these paintings to be symbols for something beyond the reach of discursive thought. The Borderlands exist outside of me and my intentions as an artist, so I invite you to find personal meaning in this mythic world.”

In the June ’23 issue of American art collector, Michael Pearce writes, “Painter Adrian Cox takes you on a visual journey into a fully-developed mythical realm between the real and imagined…He is keenly aware of the difference between experiencing a painting and understanding it, and perfectly happy for viewers to create their own narratives based on their interpretation of them. The paintings are doorways to the viewer’s creativity…Cox is on a wonderfully weird journey into the realms of his imagination and we are welcomed to it.”