ECA Presents: Flower Eaters at ANTI-AESTHETIC
Eugene Contemporary Art is proud to present Flower Eaters, an exhibition of work by Dana Buzzee, Mary Evans, and Caroline Lichucki. Across their practices, occult spirituality and art overlap, be it BDSM post-apocalypse fecundity, teen witch dreaming, or cultic technologies. These shared witch-epistemes form the site from which this exhibition emerges in the face of the anthropogenic horrors of climate crisis, dying empires, and so-called “late capitalism” accelerating around us. Individual pieces are woven together into altars—a gathering not so dissimilar from the tableau vivant mode of image making—and activated with black lights. The lighting is a crucial element to this exhibition as it offers a visual representation of space-set-apart and realities-shifted within the gallery, both during gallery hours and overnight as a glowing otherworldly oasis experienced via the storefront windows.
Dana Buzzee offers a series of large-scale speculative-healing-charm jewelry, growing out of their ongoing research regarding plastics, the visual culture and semiotics of counterculture communities, and experiences and discourse around illness, disability, health, wellness, and healing. The dual-fetishism of plastic is the confluence of fetish in a consumer-driven sense: the desire to create a network of meaning through objects within our hyperreality-strangeness, to craft both personal and community-based identity; and fetish in terms of sexuality as transgressing taboo.
The works by Mary Evans speak on channeling, death, the void, communication with otherworldly entities, and ultimately becoming an otherworldly entity, and deals with death rituals and comfort in the temporality of the human form. Scrying mirrors, or dark mirrors, are used as a portal into dimensions that are all around us but may be challenging to see. The depth of darkness represents the void space where all is unknown so all remains possible.
Caroline Lichucki uses religious iconography as metaphorical placeholders to tell a story of imaginary forces of power: Lucifer and Madonna of Sorrows come together as star-crossed lovers through a hot and heavy, gutless, bratty affliction to find their own sovereignty after being exiled from the Kingdom by their Creators. They break the oaths of their bloodlines by refusing battle for the luxurious, ordinary, and tragic ecstasy of knowing themselves as wholly worthy of a humanish existence beyond the overrated divine nectars of perfection and pure evil monstrosity.
Flower Eaters is on view at ANTI-AESTHETIC, 245 W 8th Ave, Eugene, OR, from October 23 through Dec 19, 2021, with open hours on Saturdays and Sundays, 12–4pm. The opening will take place on Friday October 22, 7–9pm, with live music by Fingerprince at 8pm.