Tyler Eash at NICOLETTI / London

Tyler Eash / Loreum

November 4 - May 1, 2021


NıCOLETTı
12A Vyner Street
E2 9DG, London

Photography: Theo Christelis






































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

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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 exis-tence 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 uncomfort-able truths and upturn reality – that of an American dream gone awry. Throughout the exhibition, recurring motifs and symbols such as horses, car engines, windshields, motor-cycle 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.

LOREUM is the artistic practice of Tyler Eash (1988, USA), who currently lives and works in Mexico. Upcoming exhibitions: Lilies in the Headlights (with Roxman Gatt) curated by Giulia Menegale, London, UK (2021); Loreum, NICOLETTI, London, UK (2020). Selected exhibitions: Mountain, curated by Camille Brechignac, B. Dewitt Gallery, London, UK (2019); Allusion to a body no longer present, Kunstraum, London, UK, Block Universe and Swiss Church, London, UK (2018); All places shall be hell that is not heaven, Deptford, London, UK (2018); A Handful of Uncertainty and Joy, Chalton Gallery, London, UK (2017); Full Moon in the Daytime, R/SF Projects, San Francisco, USA (2017). Loreum graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London, with a Master of Fine Art (2019).