On a Saturday afternoon in early March, guests entering the Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City could see and experience Adrian Cox’s art. As part of his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, titled “The Well of Dreams,” Cox hosted a one-hour, free creative wellness event and live performance by the artist, titled “The Ritual of Unknowing: A Surrealist Meditation Experience.”
“As a surrealist artist, I’m always looking for ways to engage with my subconscious mind and outmaneuver that logical part of my brain that wants to decide what a thing’s going to be before I’ve made it,” Cox explained. “One of the techniques that I started using a number of years ago is, I bought a cheap podcasting microphone and a little MIDI keyboard that I could hook up to my laptop, and I started making DIY hypnosis tracks.”
Guests were invited to bring their own yoga mats and pillows so that they could lay down comfortably.
“This guided meditation was the culmination of these efforts,” he said. “Originally, it was an audio file that I could listen to while I sat and meditated. This tool helped me to freely explore these landscapes of the imagination, these inner worlds, and search for symbols that lie a bit deeper beneath the surface. They allowed me to ride a state in between sleep and wakefulness in order to swim in these more symbolic waters as part of my process. The event was a live re-creation of the ritual of unknowing.”]
At the event, Cox also guided people through the steps of inducing trance — relaxing into an experience where they, too, could freely explore their imagination in the way that he had done preparing for the exhibition.
According to Cox, his paintings are connected by a mythic narrative set in a world called the Borderlands. For over a decade, he has cultivated this internal landscape and used his paintings to give it form. Each image that he created is an exploratory step leading deeper into a territory that exists at the threshold of the real and the imagined, the physical world and the world of dreams. The protagonists of the mythology are beings known as Border Creatures. These creatures are, both physically and spiritually, an extension of the landscape that they inhabit.
Cox was born and raised in Conyers, Georgia, in a house at the end of a long, dusty dirt road deep in the woods. His parents were a bisexual woman and a transgender woman. Cox received an undergraduate degree in painting at University of Georgia and a master’s at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught as an adjunct before moving to Los Angeles in 2018. In creating his work, Cox draws inspiration from art history, science fiction, mythic archetypes and his own experience of growing up in a closeted queer family.
In February 2018, he debuted his first solo exhibition, “Terra Incognita,” at Corey Helford Gallery and has been showing ever since: “Into the Spirit Garden” (March 2020), “Dream Country” (September 2021) and “The Brush and the Torch” (June 2023).
“My work isn’t an allegory,” Cox said. “As a surrealist artist, I’m looking for these images that I’m creating to have more meaning than singular meaning and more meaning than simply reproducing my own biography through symbolism. That being said, I think growing up in this family was very formative to how I think about the kind of images that I want to create. It showed me that you could create a space where identity was something that you could be free to explore, a space where love was the grounding principle, where identity that perhaps could be perceived as other culturally could be freely expressed as a wild, joyful thing. This informs a lot of the sensibility that I bring to the paintings that I make.”
This exhibition, “The Well of Dreams,” tells the story of Maker, a sculptor whose hand was pierced by a Specter’s arrow while opening a portal into the void. This injury, known as the Cosmic Wound, poisoned Maker and blackened their hand. When Maker was unable to heal themself by conventional means, the other Border Creatures devised a ritual to guide their wounded friend through the Labyrinth of Unknowing and into the dreamworld.
“At this particular point in my life, I think art has become a contemplative practice for me, and I mean that in the spiritual or even perhaps religious sense,” Cox said. “There is a reflective meditative quality to the process of creating images, of seeking this knowledge within myself that creates a spiritual practice out of the process of creating art. On one level, the need to be an artist is that need toward self-reflection, but I don’t mean that in a narcissistic or solipsistic kind of way, but in a way where, as a surrealist artist, by gazing inward, I’m hoping to find something beyond what I think of as myself to discover unexpected things through the process of art that I might not otherwise find.”
“People relate to my work for different reasons,” he continued. “On one level, there’s this narrative world, this mythology that people really connect to. We as humans, the way that we experience the world primarily is through story. It’s how we understand the world and give it meaning. By framing these works as part of an ongoing story, part of a mythology, and putting all the symbols that I’m pulling up from the depths into the shape of mythology, I think people engage with it on that level of, on one hand, entertainment, because storytelling is enjoyable, and then on the other, through conversations I’ve had, people are sensing perhaps some of that contemplative work that I’m doing to create these images and are able to find a connection on that level as well.”
ON VIEW: “The Well of Dreams”
WHEN: Through March 28, 2026; Tuesday-Saturday, Noon – 6 p.m.
WHERE: Corey Helford Gallery, 571 S. Anderson Street, Los Angeles
INFO: 310-287-2340, coreyhelfordgallery.com