The center currently offers full moon ceremonies, solstice and equinox celebrations, workshops and other cultural offerings, and is in the early stages of constructing Entheon, a 3D-printed sanctuary of visionary art slated to open in 2015.Īlex is a longtime supporter of music-having had his vibrant images incorporated into album artwork for several bands including Tool, the Beastie Boys, Nirvana and The String Cheese Incident-and considers festivals to be special environments particularly nurturing of creative thought. A few years later in 2008, The Foundation for the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors secured a permanent 40-acre retreat center in Wappinger, NY, and was granted official 501(c)(3) status. In order to publicly exhibit the series, Alex and Allyson co-founded The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM), a transdenominational church dedicated to spiritual renewal through transformative art, in the Chelsea area of New York City.
As viewers stand before each painting, they are encouraged to contemplate their physical and spiritual identities, representing a journey toward their own divine nature. Chronicling a physical-to-mental-to-transcendental pathway, the series begins with crisp, anatomically precise layers of the human body’s physical systems (muscular, skeletal, cardiovascular), moves on to images of different races, sexes and religious figures, then ends with depictions of spiritual energy manifested as cosmic white light. Inspired by an LSD-induced vision that Alex and Allyson shared in 1976, Alex developed the “Sacred Mirrors,” a series of 21 life-size paintings created over a 10-year period that explore the interplay of body, mind and spirit. He and his wife, Allyson, are in no way shy about the influence sacramental entheogens, or psychoactive substances like LSD, psilocybin and ayahuasca ingested to “generate the divine within,” have had on their artwork over the decades. Many of Alex’s works-which include paintings, performance art, books, sculptures and installations-focus on themes of consciousness, interconnectedness and transcendence through an interfaith, multi-cultural perspective.
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