“Well, it’s 2025 now and there are totally new inspirations and totally new concerns. The gallery reflects these. In 2025, we control significant factions of the US government, not to mention The Levant. The United Nations has collapsed, leaving a psychic political power vacuum in its wake, and The Satanic State of VECTOR, the smallest sovereign state in territorial terms, has been declared an ‘experimental international neutrality zone’ or in other words, VECTOR Gallery is the frontline for World War III.”
JJ Brine is addressing the move of his ever- evolving artwork, VECTOR Gallery, to Los Angeles, where it has landed for version 3.0. The years referred to follow his own Vectorian calendar, not the one on the front of today’s newspaper.
“I am dying and being born again at all times,” he continues. “The Devil is The Lord and The Lord is The Devil.”
The gallery closed its Lower East Side space in New York last April, following two years of heat. People were intrigued or appalled – never anything in-between – by the gallery’s liberal use of satanic imagery and images of Charles Manson. Brine also performs in a Charles Manson-themed “Electronic Spirit Music” duo called The LaBiancas. VECTOR was a place where you had to promise your soul to get through the door to the bathroom (he has, following the site’s closure, given all souls back). That’s if you could get through the door at all, the gallery having spent most of its time locked with the lights on – a sprawling pit of silver and the holographic rainbow that came with it almost goading the street outside. The fact that the Wall Street Journal wrote a piece about it speaks volumes.
But what is VECTOR Gallery, exactly? Other than being akin to Bruce LaBruce (more from him later) and Marilyn Manson in its ability to fluster America.
“It’s a posthuman art temple crafted in sublimely diabolical tribute to the unity of The Devil and The Lord, catalysing the process by which The Devil and The Lord are integrated in the psyche of the externality,” Brine begins. “VECTOR has its own time-zone, glossary, religion, culture and government. There’s no war between hell and heaven, these things are all acting symbiotically and they are within all of us.”
When not referring to VECTOR as The Antichrist, Brine likes aquariums and fishing. He’ll listen
to music and likes to go into trances. “I smoke a pack of cigarettes and I wink at myself in another dimension,” he says. “Some people would call this meditating.” Brine travels a lot, visiting Tanna, Vanuatu and Haiti over the summer. “In Tanna I stayed in Yaohnanen with The Prince Philip Movement (Eye Came And Went As Emissary of YASUR). I visited to see my good friend Max Beauvoir (Supreme Chief of Haitian Voodoo) and we performed a special Renewal Ritual – The Renewal Has No Name & Cannot Be Contained.”
Currently, VECTOR is in the process of forming an all-female “Girl Government”, with Vectorian Minister of Cults, Annaliese Nielsen. Brine opened a pop-up VECTOR at The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in September. There’s talk of opening VECTOR in Tokyo, too.
“The VECTOR Gallery is a welcome return to the gallery as art factory, governed by the fecund artist himself, churning out product with a consistent and immediately recognised gestalt,” Brine’s friend, the artist and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce told Wonderland over email. It’s fitting that he should get the last word. “If the Manson Family, Warhol’s Factory, Maya Deren, and the Dalai Lama had an orgy that produced a bastard child, it would be JJ Brine.”