Publicación que acompaña la exposición homónima entorno a la figura de Alan Glass, artista plástico canadiense vinculado al movimiento surrealista, que hizo de México su hogar hasta su muerte en enero de 2023. Con más de seis décadas de producción ininterrumpida, Glass destaca por su exploración con procesos y medios poco convencionales en los que desarrolló su vasta obra, entre la que sobresalen sus ensamblajes. Este catálogo incluye los ensayos de los especialistas Abigail Susik y Kristoffer Noheden, así como un texto curatorial a cargo de Xavier de la Riva y Joshua Sánchez, en los que se examinan las influencias artísticas, literarias y espirituales que nutrieron la obra del artista.

This article examines a selection of the assemblage artist Alan Glass's art made during the COVID-19 pandemic. In either direct or oblique ways, many of Glass's works from 2020 to 2022 allude to the pandemic and other ongoing crises including war and ecological catastrophe. Drawing on archival material and interviews with the artist, the article emphasizes the significance of poetry and esotericism for his art, and interprets the works under consideration as examples of gnosopoetics, or the pursuit of higher knowledge and radical transformation through surrealist art. After outlining Glass's trajectory from drawing and painting to the medium of assemblage and situating his art in the context of Surrealism in Canada, France, and Mexico, the author proceeds to a thematic discussion of Glass's pandemic-era works. These alternate between, on the one hand, depicting a broken world and thematizing death, and, on the other, calling forth possibilities of transformation through a surrealist poetics of the ascendant sign as well as imaginary forms of communication.

Surrealism’s disdain for Western civilization has increasingly come to encompass its mistreatment of animals and the environment. The surrealist critique of the exploitation and domination of other species and the planet frequently recognizes the way in which these are bound up with repression along the lines of both gender and epistemology. This chapter examines how two novels by women surrealists from different generations thematize the nexus of environmental destruction, animal exploitation, and the triumphal march of scientistic rationalism. The British-born, naturalized Mexican artist and writer Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974) and the American artist and writer Rikki Ducornet’s Phosphor in Dreamland (1995) are caustic, humorous, and wildly adventurous interrogations of ecological catastrophes and conjurations of new modes of being that may be able to counteract them. This chapter reads The Hearing Trumpet and Phosphor in Dreamland in relation to a broader surrealist critique of environmental destruction and exploitation, and as at one and the same time eulogies of extinction and tributes to the magical potential of transformation.