Slumber Party
Amaryllis R. Flowers, 2021
Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca, NY

Slumber Party is a collection of drawings, videos, and sculpture by Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski spanning the past seven years of work.  DeJesus Moleski’s lush femme queer cosmologies favor dream logic—the invisible over the material, the liminal over the tangible, and the portals between the body and the Mystery. Inspired by methods of divination such as the Tarot, throwing the bones, sympathetic magic, astral projection, and speaking to the dead, this work explores haunting as a way to think through the experience of in-betweenness: of being neither here nor there.

Drawing on traditions of Caribbean Surrealism, DeJesus Moleski creates non-linear symbol sets that buck colonial notions of how to navigate and describe our world. Where taste has been constructed by these notions, DeJesus Moleski aims to create work of questionable taste, utilizing color and material classed as “femme” and casting it to the center of the circle. Illuminated with fluorescents, metallics, and iridescence, these images refuse a naturalizing aesthetic of the universe. Can an element as immaterial as the spirit be constructed out of the same flamboyant material aspects that mark that body as “other”?  Is it possible to place racialized femmes at the center of depictions of spiritual experiences and have that reflect a new baseline for being human? Slumber Party presents a body of work that is dreaming with the discomfort of these possibilities and exhibited at the Handwerker Gallery in Ithaca, NY October 27th - December 8th 2021.