Agony in the Garden Cocktail Party and Lectures - an evening with Timothy Grieves Carlson and Frank Leasing
Friday, January 23rd, 2026 | Start: 7PM | PWYW Tickets
ABOUT THE EVENT
You are cordially invited to a cocktail party and two lectures concerning the continuing mystical resonances of Pennsylvania's early utopian spiritual communities, The three-fold wilderness state and the complicated ethics of un-earthing. It is always wrong. Dress code = harshly formal (dress to regress). We will be drinking from baby bottles. This evening is a part of Jim Strong's on-going calendar of programs in conjunction with his current and last vox populi gallery exhibition "Agony in the Garden". Please join us.
Timothy Grieves Carlson will deliver a lecture called “Have nothing, Enjoy All: Art, Asceticism, and Inner Alchemy” drawing on his research into the life of Pennsylvania Mystic, Johannes Kelpius to explore themes resonant to the Agony in the Garden Exhibition.
Frank Leasing will deliver a lecture called :“The Shadow of the object falls across the Ego”
This performance lecture unsettles the never-dead and always-wrong figure of the archeological artifact. The ‘object’ of History is partial. A breast after birth. Time is a contaminant, volatile: forced out of the soil and into the light. In the shadow of loss, we split and subsume.
ABOUT THE LECTURERS
TImothy Grieves: I am a historian of religions working at the intersection of esotericism, ecology, and American religious history. My academic research focuses on the ways that environmental phenomena shape religious belief and behavior. I am currently Assistant Professor and Gibson Drinko Chair in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
I earned my Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Rice University in Houston, Texas in 2022, where I worked on the Archives of the Impossible project with Jeffrey J. Kripal. I was a 2021-2022 Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
My first book, American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius (Oxford University Press 2024) explores environmental knowledge, climate change, and esoteric Christianity in early modern Europe and Pennsylvania.
Frank Leasing is a movement artist, researcher, and facilitator based in Philadelphia. They are an ongoing student and practitioner of performance methodologies including Butoh, Pochinko Clown, and drag performance.
Their teaching practice challenges dominant regimes of attention, cognition, and memory, mobilizing study and scholarship through the body, space, and collective presence. Taking place in the context of the dance studio, the emphasis is on associative, shared research, rather than choreographic form or the fraught goal of ‘embodiment’.