Cleo Kempe Towers investigates the power dynamics between the selfproclaimed healer and the one in search of a blessing. Who needs to be healed and why? Who has the power to authenticate the healing needed? In the artist’s research, expanding from Jewish mysticism, Mormonism, Born-Again Christianity and New Age spirituality, one dynamic remains intact: the giver versus the receiver. By exploring these relationships, Cleo Kempe Towers wants to create spaces where these dynamics can be examined, touched, and questioned. What happens when you take ancient practices and apply them to a neoliberal context? Can what is ancient be capitalized upon? Who is the prophet, whose message we are heeding, and what happens when we stop praying to a god, and instead uplift ourselves as holy? Through the artist’s facility with language, they explore words as text, as image, as physical presence and as installation through their work. They move fluently between voices – between a personal and an authoritative, between an intimate and an institutional tone. Blurring the lines between celestial prophecy and personal desire.

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