Dana Young & Ira Cohen – Opium Elementals

Bardo Matrix started out as a psychedelic lightshow team in Boulder, Colorado in the second half of the 1960s. Of its original members (John Chick, Craig Love, Dana Young and Greg Sharits) Chick and Young followed the hippie trail to Kathmandu in 1969, where the former started his Spirit Catcher bookstore on “Freak Street”. It was from that bookstore that Chick continued Bardo Matrix as a printing press for Western travellers and American expats. When Angus MacLise and Ira Cohen arrived in Kathmandu in the early 1970s, both had already made their marks as publishers, poets and artists and when they teamed up with John Chick, Dana Young and local craftsmen in Kathmandu to publish their own works and those by American friends and colleagues under the Bardo Matrix imprint in 1974, it resulted in the now sought-after Starstreams series of pamphlets, books and broadsides. Printed in limited editions on local hand made paper, works by Paul Bowles, Gregory Corso, Charles Henri Ford, Diane di Prima, Angus MacLise, Ira Cohen and others appeared in the Starstreams series until MacLise died in Kathmandu in 1979. Dana Young died that same year on Bali.

Opium Elementals is a 1976 “Starstreams Special Edition” that combines 8 woodcuts by Dana Young and 2 poems by Ira Cohen (1935-2011). The edition – lovingly designed by Young and dedicated to opium, of which both Young and Cohen were frequent users – was printed in an edition of 350, each machine sewn copy signed by both artists. This particular copy is #107 and is in fine condition.