Untested Address: Tuhus-Dubrow, Semi-Tropic Spiritualists

Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow is a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Irvine. Her writing has appeared in SlateThe NationThe New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Dissent, where she is a contributing editor. Her first book, Personal Stereo, a cultural history of the Walkman, will published by Bloomsbury in September.

Semi-Tropic Spiritualists is a project by Los Angeles-based artists Astri Swendsrud and Quinn Gomez-Heitzeberg. Their performance works and objects explore the history of spiritual and occult belief through the Semi-Tropic Spiritualists, an organization that created a campsite meeting place outside the city limits of Los Angeles in 1905. Swendsrud and Gomez-Heitzeber are interested in spiritualism – in its early conception articulated as part science, part philosophy and part religion – as a model for exploring ideas of faith and skepticism, belief and charlatanism, as well as for the development of a space dedicated to investigation and the search for knowledge. Their work has been presented at Richard Telles Fine Art, the Vincent Price Museum, Shangri-La, and Chime & Co., among others.