黑料不打烊

In the shadow of a total eclipse, the artist relies on echolocation to place herself. The sun has disappeared and the world grows colder, yet the darkness is circumscribed by a ring of light. For years, Evangeline AdaLioryn describes feeling as though she was 鈥渁rriving at a banquet alone and seeing people dance together in different ways, in different lives.鈥� Alienation from certain normative life experiences and sorrow over what was denied them in youth are common feelings among many trans women. The work presented in Her Labyrinth, the opening of which coincides with a solar eclipse, is meant to protect and celebrate the 鈥渨alking echo鈥� of the artist鈥檚 lost girlhood. AdaLioryn has set up this space as a banquet-cum-shrine. The moon moves away from the sun. It is a kind of dawn.

A procession of blind animals act as guides through Her Labyrinth. Arranged in pairs, each animal listens and waits while guarding its twin. Wrapped in intricate sigils, they are imbued with divine protection. Vessels, a recurring motif in AdaLioryn鈥檚 work, appear here as a series of ritual-objects like candle holders and incense burners. The sigils seen in this collection are vessels too, repositories of memories that cannot be contained in language. Just as an eclipse must not be directly looked at for the threat of burning eyes, certain memories, radiant and dark, can only be invoked by looking away from them. Animals and mythological creatures coexist in the procession; memory does not distinguish between fantasy and what really happened. We remember what happened. We remember what didn鈥檛 happen. We remember what we wished had happened. We remember what will never happen as though it already has. Her Labyrinth is a celebration of the artist discovering herself in the precipitation of an evaporated dream.

Gathering inspiration from early twentieth century Art Nouveau craft houses, AdaLioryn prioritized ornate and delicate beauty in her carefully developed symbolic language. Before rendering the sigils in three dimensions, she began each one as a hand drawn illustration, eschewing digital modeling in favor of the traditional method employed by Louis Tiffany and Rene虂 Lalique. It was in this intimate early stage that the sigils were fortified with emotional memory and thus acquired their unique power.

Iridescent pastels resemble sunrises over water, or the multicolored Favrile glass pioneered by Tiffany Studios. Soft, light, or even fading, the colors appear as a permanent haze surrounding each piece. 鈥淚n my sadness, it鈥檚 a fight to bring any color to my work at all,鈥� she says. Like private prayers, the colors are whispered though the will behind them is resolute. The formal beauty displayed in the sigils鈥� complex symmetry and the animals鈥� dreamy colors stands in triumphant opposition to feelings of defeat and isolation. The elegance of these pieces derives, in part, from their delicate containment of these kinetic emotional tensions.