"Twixt Two Worlds"
The Uninvited Guest
A Magician at the Séance

October 6 to December 10, 2005

The Christine Burgin Gallery is pleased to announce the opening on October 6, 2005 of "Twixt Two Worlds," an exhibition curated by Ricky Jay and drawn from his extensive collection of material related to the history of deception. Alternately titled "The Uninvited Guest: A Magician at the Séance," the exhibition will explore the complicated and revealing relationships between magicians and mediums at the height of the spiritualism movement during the mid to late 19th century. Mediums stealing tricks from magicians, magicians debunking mediums, magicians becoming mediums and vice versa, all played out on the stage as entertainment for an audience no longer sure that seeing is believing. Among the items to be featured in the exhibition are spirit photographs documenting the materializations of some of the most well-known mediums of the day; lithographs, broadsides, publications and holograph letters of the period as well as Houdini's own glass magic lantern slides used in the delivery of his lectures on spiritualism.

Ricky Jay is considered one of the world's great sleight-of-hand artists. The former curator of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts, he is the author of two lauded histories of unusual entertainment: "Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women" and "Jay's Journal's of Anomalies," both "New York Times" 'Notable Books.' He has also written "The Magic Magic Book" for the Whitney Museum of American Art and "Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck" with photographs by Rosamond Purcell.

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