The Neon Hieroglyph

"Shani’s feminist recasting of the psychedelic genre rejects the heroic journey of the rugged individualist, reinjecting themes of communality and of psychedelically envisioned conditions of welfare and care." -

Amy Hale From the cellular to the galactic, via Paleolithic cave markings to the trace impressions left by drone photography on our mind’s eye, incorporating dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, hyper-sexual fungi, chthonic descents, and skyward ascents, The Neon Hieroglyph weaves together a series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD. The Neon Hieroglyph constructs a house of lyrical reflections for our ghosts to inhabit, a place where the gothic and the hallucinatory collide, where gothic affect and fractal dread form a mausoleum for psychedelic specters. And also the Sun! The Sun is a ghost that haunts the night!

Framed with new essays by artist and writer Caspar Heinemann and anthropologist Amy Hale, Tai Shani’s The Neon Hieroglyph continues a journey into the post-patriarchal fictions that animated her first collection, Our Fatal Magic.