THREE WORLDS: ILIJA BOSILJ BAŠIČEVIĆ, CATHERINE GARRIGUE, AND THE DODO BIRD

ONLINE VIEWING ROOM | OCTOBER 22 - DECEMBER 5, 2026

Imagination has its cultures and landscapes.  For many people living on this planet imagination is not separated from ordinary existence. Shamans, for example, venture into other realms of perception to retrieve lost souls, Native American vision quest and similar journeys are a normal part of a holistic spiritual perception of the world.

In his book Journeys into the Invisible: Shamanic Technologies of the Invisible anthropologist Charles Stepanoff says:

Modern Western societies, which tend not to recognize that dreams can have any social value, are heirs to a very particular philosophical tradition in which imagination and reality are thought of as two intrinsically separate domains.  The imaginary is what is not real, and the real is what is not imaginary.  Westerners usually judge non-sensory visual experiences in negative terms; which typically draw individuals away from the matter of reality. Dreams and daydreams are only associated with the real when they are objectified and given a material form, as is the case with novels, paintings, and films.

With Three Worlds Cavin-Morris Gallery continues its exploration of the art of the Proto-Surreal (the state of being which André Breton and the Surrealists were trying to reach intellectually). 

The three artists in this exhibition live immersed in the above concept of a place where imagination is not socially blockaded from everyday life. Ilija Bosilj Bašičević, Catherine Garrigue, and the Dodo Bird have created worlds in their artistic practices that are fed by their spiritual and cultural outlooks. The worlds they have created are complex and rich. 

Ilija Bosilj (1895 – 1972, Serbia) is a master of the imagination.  The worlds he depicts in his paintings are detailed and sophisticated in the consistency of their layered story tellings.  With his work the walls began to crumble in the outmoded idea of ‘naïve’ or ‘primitive’ art, labels which belittle the sagacity of this artist and distances the work itself from being taken seriously by an artworld that has little history of attention to this concept of original, primal imagination. For a long time Ilija’s work was bundled in the European ‘naïve’ ghetto when in fact his ideas and concerns were made in deliberate reaction to harsh everyday events, a litany of totalitarianism, displacement, and class warfare. We are grateful to his family for giving us the opportunity to show this grand master’s cosmologies on our walls.

When Jonathan Sadowski was young and still in school, he was told by an unenlightened teacher that given his grades, he would never be able to become a pilot, calling him a Dodo Bird.  In a form of karmic retribution, he flew solo in a small bush plane in the less populated Northern reaches of Ontario and (briefly) in Arctic Nunavut, Baffin Island region.  He took the ‘brush” name of The Dodo Bird as a moniker of pride and accomplishment after he retired from flying.  He began to make drawings of a universe of air and numinous beings who are his own pantheon of Nature and human spirits such as the wind, the clouds, and aspects of the weather and air itself, aspects of time, memories, anxieties, fantasies and joy that occupy what is no longer seemingly an empty or negative space but is actually a populating and activation of the energies and beings with a consistent animistic electricity.  His drawings take us aloft with him where he meets the antagonistic and benevolent monsters manifested by and living within his own restless consciousness.

There is a dark clear beautiful sense of occult Place in the drawings of Catherine Garrigue.  It is a sacred space inhabited by epic monuments and architectures and the visages of beings who watch over the external world forcefully even with eyes closed.  Emotion is compressed into a visualization of creative silence.  Garrigue’s truths are free of judgment.  If we ask them questions, we must be prepared for the depth of their answers. These faces are depictions of the Ancestors.  In other drawings there are almost entheogenic bursts of color and fecundity that contrast with yet continue the mysteries of the pools of calmness in the more monotone drawings.  Garrigue shares her visions and leaves privileged doors open for us to both observe and be watched over by her guardians.  She has a brilliant gift of engaging us in her timeless soliloquies and epic world. 

For further information please contact us at info@cavinmorris.com or call us at 212-226-3768.