From left: Kathryn Garcia A Spiritual Diagram of the Feminine Void, 2025, Colored pencil on paper 48 x 36 inches. Limbert Gonzalez Camino del Jaguar, 2025, Photo transfer, oil, graphite, colored pencils, and ultra violet print on canvas 92 x 67.5 inches
LOS ANGELES
EL PORTAL
Jul 12 - Sep 7, 2025
Opening Reception: Sat, Jul 12, 7-10 pm
Special Performances:
Sat, Jul 12, 8 pm & Sat, Aug 16, 8 pm
Performance & Event Details:
Sat, Jul 12, 8 pm: Medicine songs and Pachacuti Mesa ceremony lead by Lauren Armstrong, Vicki Coronado, and Gil Sandoval
Fri, Aug 8, 8pm (The Lion’s Gate): online video release by Kathyrn Garcia
Sat, Aug 16, 8pm: Bendix rooftop ceremonial performance by Sean Noyce
Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles invites you to enter EL PORTAL, a transdisciplinary exhibition of 6 visual artists and 5 performance artists, whose work explores transcendence and transformation through the use of ayahuasca, “the medicine”, ceremony, and ritual. EL PORTAL explores key aspects of the visionary experience through painting, drawing, sculpture, and performance. Affectionately referred to as “The Grandmother Spirit” by indigenous cultures, ayahuasca provides both the inspiration and departure point for the work in this exhibition.
Ayahuasca is a bitter tea that is made from brewing the leaves of the Chacruna plant and the Ayahuasca vine, both of which are found in the Amazon rainforest. It is not considered a drug in the traditional sense, but a sacred sacrament by the indigenous cultures that utilized it for its entheogenic/spiritual potential. For Amazonian shamans it is a “technology” that provides opportunities for direct contact with the intelligence of the plant world. Through careful guidance by trained shamans participants in ayahuasca ceremonies are able to establish energetic pathways to a timeless wisdom that is non-human — and perhaps not of earthly origin — yet inseparably rooted in the wisdom of the Amazonian jungle.
Today, practitioners in large numbers from beyond the Amazon are experiencing ayahuasca and the profound personal, societal, and ecological changes it is urging us to make. Among the countless insights that people experience regarding personal transformation on the medicine, one message that often comes through is the calling to heal the planet and protect the natural environment. Artists are often compelled to produce work that bears witness to the profound beauty and transformative potential of the ayahuasca experience — a message that begins in the heart and travels to the minds of others, calling for a planetary healing and enlightenment.
Although not all of the artists in the exhibition have worked with ayahuasca, they all share an interest in the medicine and visionary art. Art has always been a portal and vehicle for spiritual growth and transformation, but with ayahuasca, humans have rarely found such a potent and consistent ally in creating a rich creative and gnostic connection to the natural world. Although the exhibition is not meant to be restricted to only ayahuasca-inspired art, it speaks to the larger idea of art as a vehicle for opening portals of consciousness and transformation — in the same way that a shaman’s ceremonial melody (Icaro) opens a portal to another dimension of healing and wisdom.
EL PORTAL will also feature musical performances and ceremonies throughout the run of the exhibition highlighting various ayahuasca and ceremonial practices with performances by Lauren Armstrong, Vicky Coronado, Kathryn Garcia, Sean Noyce, and Gil Sandoval.
About the work
Kathryn Garcia’s work enters into dialogue with visionary artists such as Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz, both of whom considered their practices to be forms of transmission—vehicles for spiritual intelligence. Like them, Garcia does not simply depict, she channels. Her drawings emerge from altered states of awareness—whether contemplative, somatic, or ceremonial. Her drawings and pyramids serve as portals: visual and spatial technologies that allow us to enter the void and return renewed.
Limbert Gonzales is a visionary artist living and working in the Amazon jungle whose vividly colorful paintings of plants, animals, and spirits bring to life the enchanted coexistence that occurs between indigenous tribes and their surroundings. Limbert works with ayahuasca on a regular basis in his daily life and uses it to channel his paintings. He is also a committed spiritual teacher and eco-activist teaching young children in the Amazon to paint as a way of fostering a protective relationship with the rainforest and global citizenship among future generations.
Although Sean Noyce has not worked with ayahuasca, he exhibits parallel interest in ceremonial performance art and folk magic, sometimes called “traditional medicine” by his Mormon ancestors. So much of Noyce’s work points to the evolution, dilution, and dissemination of shamanic practices from the American frontier to Northern European folk traditions.
Ian Patrick Cato is another artist who does not make work explicitly about ayahuasca, but is deeply interested in the psychedelic experience as represented through painting as well as the various transformative possibilities inherent in shamanism. His paintings are richly layered, creating a trans-like tableau of imagery that feels truly visionary. The way his paintings confront the viewer in a multilayered visual miasma in many ways mirrors the altered states and visions that one might experience on an ayahuasca journey.
The Shipibo textile artists in the exhibition (Isabel Franchini and Flor Patricia Urguia Bardales) offer the indigenous perspective and way of working with the medicine to derive images. For the Shipibo, an indigenous people from the Amazon basin in Peru, the jungle reveals geometric patterns in various ways that can be represented both visually and as powerful healing songs (Icaros). Each intricately designed textile is a musical score that can be performed in healing ceremonies to protect the participants as one may experience in an Ayahuasca ceremony. Furthermore, the Icaros and textiles can be the manifestations of spiritual transmissions that occur in the ceremonies or when the shamans are working directly with the plants in what are called “dietas” (diets).
Kathryn Garcia (b. Los Angeles, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in devotion to the sacred feminine and the transformative power of ritual. Working across video, sculpture, sacred geometric drawing, site-specific performance, and immersive installation, Garcia creates contemporary temples—portals for healing, remembrance, and embodied Presence. Guided by her spiritual practice and pilgrimages to ancient sites across the globe, Garcia integrates somatic movement, ceremonial architectures, and ancestral memory work into her evolving body of work. Her sculptures often take the form of stainless steel pyramids—geometric vessels designed for meditation, activation, and collective resonance. In both solo and participatory contexts, Garcia's work invites audiences to enter altered states of awareness and communion, blurring the boundary between viewer and ritual participant. Her video and drawing practices further explore these themes—tracing mythic narratives, trance states, and cosmological grids through the body and line. Whether filmed at sacred landscapes or constructed from within them, Garcia’s videos are living devotions—transmissions of presence, vulnerability, and timeless knowing. Garcia’s work often centers the female body as a sacred site and generative force, reimagining the Goddess archetype as a portal for reclamation, spiritual sovereignty, and collective healing. These experiences—offered through movement, sound, form, and stillness—awaken interconnectedness and restore the body as a vessel of divine intelligence. Early in her career, Garcia collaborated internationally with Emi Fontana and Rirkrit Tiravanija on landmark projects such as Women in the City (2008), Palm Pavilion (2008), and Asile Flottant (2010). Her work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad, including Hauser & Wirth; the Orange County Museum of Art; LAXART; Various Small Fires; 356 Mission; Gavlak Gallery (Los Angeles); Pace Gallery; GBE; Participant Inc; PS1-MoMA (New York); Ballroom Marfa; The Power Station (Dallas); Nina Johnson (Miami); The Bunker Artspace (West Palm Beach); Edel Assanti and Southard Reid (London); Embajada (Puerto Rico); Arredondo/Arozarena (Mexico City); and the DESTE Foundation (Greece).
@bbydbl
Visionary Artist Limbert Gonzales Laulate (b. 1979, Yarinacocha-Ucayali, Peru) is an artist specialized in visionary Amazonian contemporary art, graduated from the School of Painting. Amazonian Usko-Ayar, Limbert grew up surrounded by the Amazon rainforest, where contact and interaction with nature led him to become interested in Amazonian art. In 1992 he met the master visionary Amazonian painter Pablo Amaringo, Director and founder of the Amazonian painting school USKO-AYAR who recognized him as one of his disciples for receiving his philosophical teachings. Limbert Gonzales is an artist who is dedicated to teaching neo-Amazonian painting to children and young people in the Peruvian jungle. In 2003 he began to paint visions of ayahuasca and other medicinal plants. In 2013 he was. recognized nationally by the National Institute of Culture.
@limbert_gonzales
facebook.com/limbert.gonzales
Sean Noyce (b. 1979, Salt Lake City, UT) lives and works in Los Angeles and has exhibited in galleries and museums around the globe. His work has been exhibited at Scope Art Show, Miami and New York; Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm; SPRING/BREAK Art Show, LA; Franconia Sculpture Park, Schafer, MN; Galerie Pompom, Sydney, Australia; (e)merge Art Fair, Washington, D.C.; Texas Contemporary, Houston; QiPO, Mexico, City; The San Diego Art Institute; Temple University, Rome; Torrance Art Museum; University of Colorado, Colorado Springs; Oxnard College; and the Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island. Noyce’s work has been featured in The Washington Post; Artforum; Fabrik Magazine; FULL BLEDE; New York Daily News; Playboy; Voyage LA; Only In Hollywood; and Flavorpill.
Ian Patrick Cato (b. 1991, Orange, CA) is a Nashville raised, Los Angeles based artist. Cato is fascinated by the blurriness between reality and fiction in our present world. -“All my favorite sci-fi movies are coming true!” Living in the capital of make believe, he likes painting ‘simulations’ that draw inspiration from the science fiction & fantasy pop culture of his youth, the aesthetics of trucking decals & bumper stickers out on the freeways, and the often overlooked supernatural aspects of nature. He uses Gonzo style sampling to reinterpret these different historical iconographies; casting a wide net of spangled insignia across the dusk of an American cultural landscape. Sometimes like maps, other times more like mirages, Cato’s work offers a quintessential perspective into the hallucinatory matrix of contemporary Southern California culture. Cato received his BFA in 2015 from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, School of Art. He has exhibited work at Blum & Poe (2020) Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2019) Japan, Over The Influence booth at NADA NYC (2022), Space Ten (2021, 2022) Los Angeles, Gallery ALSO (2018, 2021, 2024) Los Angeles, and Modest Common (2024) Los Angeles.
Isabel Franchini is a Shipibo textile artist living in the Yarinacocha area of Pucallpa, Peru.
Flor Patricia Urguia Bardales is a Shipibo textile artist who resides in the Comunidad Nativa San Francisco which is one of the oldest and largest Shipibo communities in the Ucayali region in the center of the Peruvian Amazon.
Vicky Coronado and Gil Sandoval are ceremonialists who play medicine music and hold cacao and ambil ceremonies. Their business, Viva La Vida, sells ambil, chilcuague, and beautifully designed t-shirts. They reside in Boyle Heights with their baby, Ramses.
Lauren Armstrong (b. 1979, Portland, OR) is a singer, song writer, and ceremonialist. She has a Bachelor's Degree in Theater from the University of Oregon and a Master of Fine Arts in Acting from the University of Iowa. She has trained with shamans and medicine carriers from Peru, Brazil, Ecuador and Hawai’i. Most recently she has assisted in facilitating ayahuasca ceremonies with the Yawanawa tribe from the Brazilian Amazon. This is her first official curatorial collaboration with Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles.
photos by Gemma Lopez coming soon