The Dynaton
Chateau Shatto, in active collaboration with the Lucid Art Foundation, presents The Dynaton, curated by Laura Whitcomb, an exhibition that revisits and expands the 1951 San Francisco Museum of Art show that first brought together Gordon Onslow Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, and Lee Mullican under the name of “the possible.” Drawing on major works and archival materials from the Lucid Art Foundation and from galleries that have been central to championing Surrealism and its legacies in California, the project approaches Dynaton as a charged convergence of cosmology, experimental psychology, physics, and indigenous epistemologies, and as a pivotal reconfiguration of Surrealist thought in a postwar Pacific context.
It also highlights the lesser-known pivotal role of Jacqueline Johnson, whose writing, translation, and editorial efforts shaped the formulation and circulation of Dynaton’s ideas, alongside other women whose practices moved in oblique dialogue with its propositions.