by Logan Royce Beitman for the Albuquerque Journal
Is living in a fantasy world always bad? What if we only visit? In her solo exhibition, “Pursuing Defeat,” Amaryllis R. Flowers opens a portal to a glittery, pearlescent, lavender fairyland where anyone feeling defeated by life, or simply blue, can find rejuvenation. It’s escapism as a strategy for survival.
Flowers’ characteristic femme figures — sometimes sprouting mystical third eyes, sometimes nude and wielding electric guitars that shoot flames — tumble and bounce on “My Little Pony-ish” flared legs through what she calls “environments of psychic revolt.” Like Henry Darger’s nonbinary “Vivian Girls,” they fight intergalactic battles against colonialism and patriarchy.
Although Flowers currently lives and works in upstate New York, she spent some of her formative years in Santa Fe, where she took her first art classes. You may recognize her work from the exhibition “Broken Boxes” at the Albuquerque Museum, on view through Sunday, March 2.
Stylistically, Flowers combines the unabashedly “girly” look of Lily van der Stokker’s Barbie-pink art with the middle-school scrapbook sensibility of Wendy White and the otherworldly feminist tableaus of Chitra Ganesh. Her bric-a-brac materials — vending machine teeth, puff paint, googly eyes, glitter, plastic baby bottle charms, holographic Easter grass and candy raver beads — connect her to Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, the Stonewall Uprising participant and granddaddy of underground queer art, who cobbled subversive rococo altarpieces from cellophane candy wrappers, glitter and linoleum beginning in the 1960s.
For readers who find art like this as incomprehensible as Gen Z slang, don’t let yourself be fooled by the schlocky Dollar Store materials, puff paint and pink glitter. Flowers might make her collage paintings with the same fun, shiny stuff that kids like to play with, but it’s absolutely not something “your kid could do.”