Loreum

Nicoletti Contemporary, London, UK

November 11, 2020 - Jan 30, 2021

why am I as I was and not as I am tonight?

cheek flushed and blushed, I am in this moment right

what’s left shined through when it burned too bright

eager for a dream, I, the full moon in the daylight

eyes closed so I can stare into the sun

to feel warmth where there was none

I am cupping clear water in my hands to make a mirror from that deep winter I forgot,

the coldest deep blue water of my thought

Where I was too fearful of the unfound bottom to swim.

it’s the depth and deepness and not knowing within

I hold a bit of grit

until it turns over and over in my stomach to make a pearl in my insides

glimmering shining iridescent like a 2 tone Cadillac at sunset

I think fake diamonds are more reflective, but we hate liars, and those who cheat at being true

beauty

Round little pain like the moon in my palm

it is heavy and controls the tides

and pulls forceful tears from onlookers eyes

I’d like to be an apparition because you might doubt seeing me

and you might interpret me as an omen when I walk into a room to get a glass of water for

this endless thirst

why a bird flies without asking why

enough to jump mid-air into the sky

the not knowing is weightlessness

and makes me wrestle restlessness

so I say that I am not known

Think of me like a word you forgot

Changeling:

a callous on the hand that fades when out of work

a cut healed

the hedge grown over

the tires gone bald

the candle melted

the bone broken

the bone mended

the horse broken

the dog tamed

the field barren

the house burned down when you lit a candle and left

the forgetting

newness like the smoothed over ankle cut from marble

carved by the wind or by hand

such things are made new by intention alone

so I say I am new by intended decay

My intention, My big statement, that I am fiction

Loreum, Loreum, Loreum

to be disbelieved

I am no longer real

so I may jump mid-air into the sky

without ever asking why

Tyler Eash, Changeling, 2020

Loreum is an alias, a molecularized persona disseminated across the work of American artist Tyler Eash. Deriving from ‘Lore’ – meaning folklore or knowledge of a particular group or Culture – Loreum is the name of a crystallizing desire, the labyrinthine identity of a body becoming myth, living in the interstices between reality and fantasy.

In his first solo exhibition at NICOLETTI, London, Eash registers and redistributes fragments of Loreum’s existence in a new series of paintings, drawings, sculptures and film. They tell the story of a being born of the sea foam, of a self-mythologized entity embracing dissonance (of class, gender, sexuality and self) as a means to erode uncomfortable truths and upturn reality – that of an American dream gone awry. Throughout the exhibition, recurring motifs and symbols such as horses, car engines, windshields, motorcycle handlebars, corn fields and meth pipes point to the reality experienced by an increasingly marginalised working class struggling with poverty, incarceration, homelessness and addiction. Alluding to Loreum’s background and early life, elements characteristics of a certain Americana aesthetics are nevertheless filtered through a queering lens to shift reality through a self-aware theatricality, whereby Eash fictionalizes his past, examines the present, and fantasizes the future.

-Camille Houzé, Director Nicoletti Contemporary