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2023
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CURATORIAL STATEMENT
There are vessel—harborers of great stories—that hold our ancestries. Summoned by our shadows, they are in the petals groping sunward in blossoming grandeur, the vines crawling up the scaffold, the whispers of shaken leaves clinging desperately to their dry-barked mothers. There are transfers of energy: from history, to creator, to hand, that come to us as intergenerational messages from the dead to the living. There are memories that come to us before we even experience them.
What does it look like to yearn for, to need, to sink further into the thick fog of solitude? What is the sound of our aching? We live through multiple narratives of haunting and despair, so many cycles of loss. Through vast time spans, finite travels and sourced objects, we come to understand ourselves as we slowly disappear with each passing day. We find ourselves bruised and tired from traipsing through all of the confused logic, translating archives written in the tongues of our oppressors, inheriting the residue of violence left in their landmarks and battlefields.
We find ourselves far too late, after staring so long through the eyes of another—how they see us (or don’t). Many of us won’t ever leave the small radius of our biographies, our continents, our bodies that we don’t want to account for, or comprehend, or make real. Through the suspicion and self doubt, through tangles of darted glances, we construct a new history. What is broken can be reborn, but the reborn remains, inevitably, broken. We might learn to love the bodies we inhabit, though we mistrust how they were written. We have been dragged through the impossible mess of demanding space in a narrative, when we were its protagonists.
When does a myth become fact? When does a ghost become a body? We trace the indentations in the sand—an ocean of portraits, awash with the stories of those without language or form. We conjure the dead with each footstep. We gather the unremembered piece by piece.
What amasses above adds as much meaning as what it conceals below.
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Curatorial text by Eileen Isagon Skyers
‘A Garden Under The Earth’ installation view, at Chinatown Soup in NYC.
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presented physically at Chinatown Soup 9.18.23 - 10.01.23
presented digitally at distant.gallery 10.05.23 - ∞
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conceived by Pedro Lavín & Pearlyn Lii
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creative direction - Pedro Lavín & Pearlyn Lii
curation - Eileen Isagon Skyers
art direction & design - Virgile Flores
production - The Hybrid Studio
gallery photography - Alan Tansey
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special thanks - Constant Dullaart, Nina Lissone, Alex Darby, Greg Truono & Jon-Luke Fillippi
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Feeric Self-Portrait v2, installation view at Chinatown Soup in NYC.
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‘Fruiting Body’ installation view, at Chinatown Soup in NYC.
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Exhibition design by Virgile Flores.
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❂
‘Within, Below’ digital incarnation.
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Spiritual avatars, cyber-symbolic echoes of their creator’s core identities, traumas and dreams, inhabit these otherworldly planes.
Spiritual avatars, cyber-symbolic echoes of their creator’s core identities, traumas and dreams, inhabit these otherworldly planes.
Utilizing ancestral mythologies–Lavin with Pan-European faerie folklore, and Lii with Chinese hell cosmologies–as chthonic metaphors for their own interiority, the artists transmute crucial, personhood-defining experiences into lush, digital underworlds. Spiritual avatars, cyber-symbolic echoes of their creator’s core identities, traumas and dreams, inhabit these otherworldly planes.
Under the guise of expansive world-building unfolding across multiple mediums, Lii and Lavin bring forth their rich inner worlds as they revisit past pathos and grapple with themes of otherness: femininity, queerness, alienation and cultural identity.
Under the guise of expansive world-building unfolding across multiple mediums, Lii and Lavin bring forth their rich inner worlds as they revisit past pathos and grapple with themes of otherness: femininity, queerness, alienation and cultural identity.
In their hands, self-created, infernal mythology becomes fertile ground for sensual, emotional exploration.
Within, Below follows an evolutionary trajectory of Lavin and Lii’s bodies of work from prequel to present, that both intersects and departs towards a multiplicity of possible futures within their respective underworlds. This explorative exhibition opens a realm where Lavin and Lii continue to develop experimental practices in art, film and performance; expanding their oeuvre into ever more detailed worlds and further evolving their unique perspectives.
Within, Below follows an evolutionary trajectory of Lavin and Lii’s bodies of work from prequel to present, that both intersects and departs towards a multiplicity of possible futures within their respective underworlds. This explorative exhibition opens a realm where Lavin and Lii continue to develop experimental practices in art, film and performance; expanding their oeuvre into ever more detailed worlds and further evolving their unique perspectives.
presented physically at Chinatown Soup 9.18.23 - 10.01.23
presented digitally at distant.gallery 10.05.23 - ∞
❁
conceived by Pedro Lavín & Pearlyn Lii
-
creative direction - Pedro Lavín & Pearlyn Lii
curation - Eileen Isagon Skyers
art direction & design - Virgile Flores
production - The Hybrid Studio
gallery photography - Alan Tansey
-
special thanks - Constant Dullaart, Nina Lissone, Alex Darby, Greg Truono & Jon-Luke Fillippi
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2026
PEDRO LAVÍN
BROOKLYN / CIUDAD DE MÉXICO