Lo, the Ouroboros, its tayle devouring, was a project by Seattle-based artist JOE Milutis taking the form of an exhibition and artist talk in Nov 2018. This project departed from the seventeenth century German alchemist MICHAEL Maier’s emblem book, Atalanta Fugiens. Published in Latin in 1617, Atalanta Fugiens represents an early form of mass and multi-media that reveals a mystical pre-history of the modern world, a system of symbology and thought that preceded modern science.

B R U N A exhibited creative translations by the artist of Maier’s alchemical texts, which he composed and printed as posters that mix visual and lyric concerns and forms.  Recombining the original illustrations of Matthias Merian with his own 21st century sensibilities, in this project, Milutis teased some questions around the (im)possibilities of alchemy as a literary form, the (in)fidelity of images and symbols according to context, and the pedagogy of mysticism and montage, among others. After opening the exhibition, Milutis will also speak on the context of the project, riffing on such topics as alchemy, the Rosicrucian underground, occult Christianity, and pre-modern forms of Esperanto.