This fragment of the modern world’s history, which the artist evokes in their video “Marysville, Oh Holy Land” (2021), still fuels a blind optimism that is mirrored in the contemporary “American dream”. Through insight into their friend and neighbour’s abandoned home turned meth-squat in Loreum’s hometown of Marysville, a city on the ancestral land of the Maidu and in today’s state of California, the artist narrates the most recent
developments of the working masses’ history of abuses.

Many authors have already documented the effect of the Great Depression on the hordes of seasonal farm workers and their displaced communities that migrated towards the Western United States in the 1930s. Drawing from their background and the artist’s early life, Loreum pursues a denunciation of nowadays U.S. American poverty, addiction and mass incarceration. Loreum’s artistic practice develops as a sort of minimalistic craftsmanship capable of reinstating dignity to objects and memories discarded.

For “Marysville, Oh Holy Land”, the artist produced more than twenty sculptures made from trash and objets trouvé. The works, serving as illustration when filmed, give shape to an articulated visual and musical poem. The memories attached to their sculptures are not always theirs directly, but they also entail that of their relatives and extended kinship. The images produced thus acquire the temporal dimension of myth; they address the aìon, a circular time where individual narration fuses with that of the collective. The present moment is cut down into infinite pieces and distributed between past and future.

Scenes of a dilapidated Marysville are mixed with those representing the opposite; portraying details of marble statues, held in luxurious palaces in Venice. Whilst both cities are known for being exposed to numerous floods, the latter is called up as a symbol of the precious and preserved, the modern European civilizing project, sustained by an enlightenment-type of reasoning.Through this association, a dystopian portrait of Loreum’s hometown becomes the “canary in a coal mine” placed at nearly the endpoint of one of the many possible hegemonic narratives involving world history.

Marysville represents a cluster of disregarded promises—jobs, class mobility, resources—that have fed the neoliberal engine for many centuries. These promises are used to administer modern life and dreams; they are the underlying justifying doctrine for the consumption of working bodies and what was once wild nature.

Through Loreum’s imagery, they lose their appealing grasp on the individual’s psyche, freeing up space for new creative energies that radiate from the sensorium and subconscious. These are the loci where the Dionysian disposition of the characters performed by Loreum have been generated and head to dwell.

Giulia Menegale, “Marysville, Oh Holy Land”, Curator, Venice, Italy

Film still, featuring “*Reanimator”*, Loreum, 2021 mirror, latex “Freddie Krueger” mask, cathode tub television

“Marysville, Oh Holy Land’’ is a multilayered artistic project developed by Marysville, California native and London based artist, Loreum (Tyler Eash), which currently includes an online exhibition, two solo exhibitions and inclusion in a group exhibition. The international project was developed between 2020 and 2022, across the UK and the US, and received curatorial support by Giulia Menegale, an independent curator based in Venice.

The project initially emerged from “Lilies in the Headlights”, a joint exhibition with queer artists Loreum and Romeo Roxman Gatt. As the work was developed during quarantine, the artists had both returned to their place of origins and worked in tandem with digital designer Costas Kazantzis to develop an online exhibition. This feature was supported by a series of commissioned writings including C.G. Stack’s nonfictional essay “Manifestnation” regarding Marysville, and Louis Mason’s fictional story “The Executioner” regarding the subject of angels.

Following this debut, Loreum’s contribution of their filmic work “Marysville, Oh Holy Land”, took the physical form of two solo exhibitions, staged simultaneously in April 2022, at Four Fourteen Gallery in Marysville, California and Kupfer in London, UK. The shows were introduced by two separate letters written by the artist as a way to address the apparent disparity in socio-economic status and class between both London and Marysville. The film was included in “Drück nur auf die Klinke”, the premiere exhibition of Jäegerschere Gallery for Contemporary Art in Niederer Fläming, Germany, in May 2022.

The project includes a series of sculptural installations, paintings, and writings in support of the central film, which envelops all the works of Loreum within one. The film, music, and sculptures were made with assistance from Anthony Baussy, Robert Reimers, and Nancie Greene. Installation of the show was organised by Tina Linville of Four Fourteen Gallery, Robert Reimers, and Nancie Greene, with significant installation direction from Matthew Coats. The initial production and the first phase of the exhibition was supported by a generous grant from Arts Council England. Additionally, the project has received support from Nicoletti Contemporary in London, UK with guidance from Kunstraum Gallery in London.