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.
Eash’s work employs choreography and performance as means to embody Loreum’s modes of being, which are then redistributed into series paintings, drawings, sculptures, films and poems. Operating as physical traces of a vaporous existence, Loreum’s movements, images and texts (re)compose the story of a being born of the sea foam, a self-mythologized entity embracing dissonance (of class, gender, sexuality and self) as a means to erode uncomfortable truths and upturn reality.
As such, Loreum’s practice always unfolds within the interstices between reality and fantasy, an unstable territory where metaphorical elements such as seashells, pearls, snakes, flowers and horns often coexist with motifs pointing to the reality experienced by an increasingly marginalized American working class – cars, motorcycles, horses, corn fields and meth pipes, for instance. Alluding to Loreum’s background and early life, conditions of poverty, homelessness, incarceration and addiction are filtered through a queering lens and a self- aware theatricality, whereby the artist transfigures elements of the real and creates non-binary spaces where questions authenticity, identity and class struggle can be readdressed.
LOREUM is the artistic practice of Tyler Eash (1988, USA), who currently lives and works in London (UK) and Mexico (MX). Selected solo and duo exhibitions: Channel 1, Further, San-Francisco, CA, USA (2022); Marysville, Oh Holy Land, Kupfer Projects, London, UK (2022); Marysville, Oh Holy Land, Four Fourteen Gallery, Marysville, USA (2022); Lilies in the Headlights (with Roxman Gatt) curated by Giulia Menegale, London, UK (2021); Loreum, NICOLETTI, London, UK (2020), and Mountain, B. Dewitt Gallery, London, UK (2019). Selected group exhibitions and performances: Drück nur auf die Klinke, Jägerschere, Berlin, GE (2022); La forme de l’eau, Galerie Joseph, Paris, FR (2022); Sun Kissed, NÉVÉ, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2022); 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).
