Temple Projects
2019 W Temple StLos Angeles, CA
Saturdays — 2-6pm
Godperson93
Dogperson39 and Parker Ito
Organized by Grant Edward Tyler
May 30th - July 12th, 2025
Saturdays from 2-6pm & by appointment
I have a lot of beliefs about art. They might all be wrong, I'm open to that. Maybe just some of them are wrong. I believe that the most important thing art can offer is an aesthetic experience that transcends logical and moral thinking. I believe it can produce those experiences with enough power to allow a viewer to step beyond the trap of daily life, to overcome what Henry Miller referred to as a living death. Sometimes I'm not sure if I've had this kind of experience or if I'm just fooling myself into thinking it's possible with some clever theories and logic. Often, when looking at what passes for art today, I doubt whether beauty is possible at all. Romantics like Kinkade always seem to insist it is not only possible, but that beauty truly existed, only that time has passed and will never be recovered, sort of like the innocence of Adam and Eve. I've had beautiful experiences of the past, I think. Once I watched as a curvaceous influencer posed for a selfie with the Egyptian Temple of Dendur at the Met, which is a devotional structured dedicated to Isis, who is, among other things, a fertility goddess. I already felt the aesthetic current of the temple resonating down to me through history, but it became all the more potent when juxtaposed with the curvaceous woman making images of herself with it for her followers. It was like Isis was in the room. It seems obvious to me that for the Egyptians—for all cultures until the 19th century—the continuity of the religio-aesthetic experience was taken for granted. Maybe in some ways it is still nested in our secular culture. There's a band called Current 93 that explores those themes.
The bishop at the church I sometimes go to is 93. He's a God person in the sense that he's devoted his life to God. I first learned about Bishop Stephen Hoeller from a professor at the art school I went to in Chicago, where I first became interested in religion. I found that religion can sometimes do more than yolk artistic creativity to dead forms for the sake of didactics, which was my default judgement against religious art. As I get older, I often find myself more artistically inspired by religious or spiritual images and stories than Contemporary Art. In part that's because the bar for artistic quality has been thoroughly decimated over the past few generations. But I also think the various religious heritages are the products of people who spent millennia cultivating powerful aesthetic responses in order to help others in their lives and in the world. So whether I believe the stories or not, whether I chose to modify my behavior according to them or not, I have found that keeping myself open to them aesthetically has been productive in my capacity as a writer and curator of art. I chose to believe that art can hold a unique power, and that this power used to be thought of as a kind of God.
—Grant Edward Tyler
Photos by Brendan Jaks