Art-o-rama
Boris Camaca & Loreum
31.08.23 - 03.09.23At Art-o-rama, Camaca presents a series of photographic portraits of Loreum taken during encounters between the two artists in London. Focusing on the latter’s use of their body as a medium in their practice, Camaca’s photographs capture fragments of performances staged in locations that evoke some of the recurring themes in Loreum’s work, such as nature, Indigeneity and colonialism. Through series of frontal shots, Camaca catches Loreum in the act while questioning traditional modes of representation of masculinity, rejecting the idealized vision of the male body to rather express the tension between vulnerability and self-performativity at work within processes of identification.
Loreum expands on these ideas through a series of paintings on cowhide, a material alluding to life conditions in rural California, where the artist was partially raised by a Maidu and Modoc grandmother. Entitled Angels, these works address the artist’s multi-ethnicity by revisiting the biblical figure of the angel, departing from its European representation as a human-like being to reconnect with its descriptions in American Indian traditions, in which angels were significantly more abstract, symbolizing the holiness of nature and the inherent power of psyche and spirit. Here, the angel becomes a figure through which Loreum addresses the issue of cultural erasure facing the American Indian, using spirituality and mythology as tools to retrieve and perpetuate one’s identity.