The ALCHEMIST

Brad Kunkle turns lead into silver and gold for his newest show at Arcadia Contemporary.

- MICHAEL CLAWSON

In Alejandro Jodorowsky’s landmark 1973 surrealist film The Holy Mountain, a thief ascends a great tower on a golden hook. At the top of the tower, in a rainbow throne room, an alchemist transmutes elements from the thief’s body into solid gold. Later, on a path to enlightenment, the thief and the alchemist assemble a party that treks through a world filled with the bizarre, grotesque, profound and obscene.

Amid it all, though, is a persistent motif: Creation is not bound by the physical world. Gold can come from flesh, eternal life from holy mountains, enlightenment from the absurd. This is the backbone of alchemy, and it’s something that Brad Kunkle has been pondering for his new show at Arcadia Contemporary.

“The show is called alkame. This is how the word alchemy appears in a dictionary for pronunciation. I thought it was fitting because it’s kind of a literal manifestation of a meaning of the word. Alchemy is an ancient branch of natural philosophy—a magical process of creation and transformation with the pursuit to attain a perfected final state,” Kunkle says from his New York studio. “On a broad scope, I’ve been exploring the idea of magical thinking and alchemy, which led me to literal spell casters…the history of witchcraft, etc. And all of that looped me back to the broader initial fascination with magical thinking and alchemy. Whether someone is a practicing witch or a catholic priest, or even just someone who believes in serendipity, the commonality is that they all believe that there is an invisible world that can affect their lives. Magical thinking is a strong force that has been a part of the human story since the dawn of time, and it’s an endless source of inspiration for me.”