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.