Ciriza
Oneiric Caves Gush Multiplicity
July 7 - August 11, 2018A black bed of horsehair, braided, roped, and woven into a bodily armature, sits atop an ancient expanse of sand. Within, she wakes. She suits herself in the braided bodice and rides out to sea, her footsteps limning the perimeter of sleep. She sings the tyrannical storms, exhales the gusts of raging winds, and electrifies the night in her undisguised intensity. She is the gatekeeper of death, the governor of change.
Spirits of Yoruban orishas anchor Ciriza’s work, as their stories and symbols offer paths toward cathartic transformations. Rooted in the medicinal, sculptural works illuminate the possibilities of healing and metamorphoses within the opacity of shadow and murk. Planetary materials such as clay and bismuth are transmuted to reveal alchemical mysteries. Like wrinkled skin deteriorating, a large latex drapery silently cries its secrets in Braille. Emboldening myth by twisting the wires of reality, Ciriza holds reverence for the primordial forces that have informed her. Small units—braids, beads, small casted geodes—collectively amass to a great offering of the handmade that awakens the dormant secrets and memories of a silenced ancestral past. Oneiric Caves Gush Multiplicity is a manifestation of how the artist both harnesses and yields to the visionary power of the plutonian blue.
Ciriza is a multidisciplinary artist and a birth doula. She works in the realms of dreams, symbolism, mythology, ancestry, animism, and alchemy. Her works are explorations of states of fluidity and transmutation; the slippery, elusive, and anomalistic spaces materialize in tactile and visceral forms. The result is otherworldly, a connection to the infinite where phantasmagoria becomes tangible, familiar, and feral. Ciriza’s instruments are performance, film and video, sculpture, installation, sound, and drawing. Her performances are a distillation of raw energy in ritualistic catharsis: a theater of the primordial, through which she uses the body to explore the fragile threshold between being and not being. Her hope is to offer abstract medicine through sensual forms.
