NOON Projects is honored to present Once I’ve Poured the Concrete, a new body of work by Daniel Long. This show deals with themes of transformation, permission, queer blessings, living with HIV, and glimpses into the interior. During the pandemic, Long’s studio practice provided a place of safety to explore his own and the world's great transformation. From this journey inward came this series of paintings of architectural spaces from paused memories and iPhone photos taken in dimly lit hallways, bathhouses, foyers, and open doorways. These interiors depict quotidian yet private scenes of queer life; the view of a tiled floor from the waiting room of a sexual health clinic, a last look back into an apartment building after leaving a hookup, two lovers together in bed with one gazing into a phone on a dating app, and a red-lit video arcade with a series of open doors. The open doors are thresholds, liminal spaces for one to pass from one side to the other. Long creates a pause in these spaces and shares a perspective from both the inside looking out and the outside looking in. In the series of shell paintings, the shells levitate to the surface and at the same time, represent human-like figures with a mysterious private interior not visible to the outside world. Long gives us a glimpse inside these private spaces in his paintings depicting dream-like compositions of airbrushed male figures, butterflies, tropical foliage, and angels. Within these surreal environments inside the secret world of the shell, the artist explores the shadow side and the tender interior so rarely share with the outside world. Long’s paintings celebrate queer life where his version of self is not judged, but acknowledged, and celebrated. Daniel Long (born 1984, Memphis, Tennessee) is a visual artist that explores the human experience with themes of intimacy, partnership, pleasure, and connection deep inside of queerness. Working primarily in painting, Long’s creative practice also includes an array of output including apparel, print editions, and sculptures. His studio practice functions as a way to celebrate the act of painting and provides a stage of permission to celebrate. It is a context and situation for celebration itself. Long received his MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific NW College of Art in 2013 and BFA from Memphis College of Art in 2006. He has shown at Artist Curated Projects and Panel (Los Angeles), Nationale and PMoMA (Portland). Text Editing: Laura O’Quin Images by Ruben Diaz __ NOON Projects is honored to present <333, a gathering and exhibition of offerings, spells, and invocations by Los Angeles-based magical practitioners and artists: medicine person Star Catherine Feliz, gardner and diviner Jamie Ross, and mage L. Although Ross, Feliz, and L have unique celestial and ancestral origins, their individual callings, practices, and worldviews intersect at a multitude of nodes. A few particular overlaps between their ways of living, being, and their direction of will are: their personal cultivations and transformations; their work with other humans, Earthlings, and spirits to generate an increase of aetherial and terrestrial unbindings and transmutations; their shared desires to reinstate a greater balance and unity with the natural order of our planet and the cosmos. A common womb between them is their use of glass jars, jugs, and containers in the gestation of their potions. Out of these vessels are birthed aeons of cosmic unconditional love and the code of incalculable expansions. Botánica Cimarrón, founded by Star Catherine Feliz, is an earth-to-counter bespoke apothecary and purveyor of spiritual goods, rooted to the land as well as to Feliz’ ancestral Afro-Taino knowledge-ways. Their ancestors were maroons, aka cimarrónes, in the present-day Dominican Republic. Botánica Cimarrón is a liberatory brand that carries forward their intimate relationship to the land, cosmos, and each other for a new generation of people opening their hearts to the call of the Earth. Feliz’ medicines are made with 100% organic ingredients and strive to always source from bio-regional regenerative farms. For <333, Feliz has set up a nomadic Botánica Cimarrón, with a selection of Elixirs and Alcoholado, as well as ceremonial accouterments and ritual ware. In Feliz’ words, their medicines are a love story for the ages. Coming of age at a time when revealing, coming-out, and disclosure were elevated to the behest of other modes of Queer knowing, Jamie Ross is drawn to places of erotic privacy, coming-in, horny hiding, and the libidinal clandestine. Their work embodies an attraction to spaces that support Queer communal ecstasy as a means to forge bonds of kinship and connection. Included in <333 is Ross’ multimedia photographic reproduction of a rare archival image from a series related to the first Faggot and Trans owned and operated drinking spaces in Montreal (Club Gemini, 1969) and Los Angeles (The 606 Club, 1914). Ross also presents an active fermenting carboy of wild cider. The glass jar pays homage to the feminine and gender-variant nature of the vibrant, ongoing Queer brewing traditions and the apple farmering Pagan matriarchs that trained Ross in the art of cider fermentation in the northern Appalachians. L’s offerings to <333 are a selection from their broad alchemical manifestations that draw upon knowledge obtained from a lifelong practice of folk ritual, ceremonial magic, and occultism. One focus of L’s work is pointing others to their inherent divinity outside of the current capitalist spiritual-magic paradigm that often solidifies desires and reinforces positions towards the material-external, neverending trap of unfulfillment. L’s Spell for Transcendence (2015 - 2022) is a living and evolving vessel with an aggregation of charged items from significant moments in their personal and shared journeys of awakenings and reprogramming. *** Altar (2016) is a true-to-scale photograph of a destroyed folk magic altar that L ritually constructed in a palace in Bucharest, Romania. Wand One (2002 - 2022) was crafted by L following arcane medieval sorcerer staff making instructions and features a feather from L’s late dove, Thoth.