Darwin, the Declining Daystar

Flatline Gallery, Long Beach , CA

December 12, 2020 — January 8, 2021

This is exhibition combines figurative painting and sculptural pieces that reveal the artist’s participation in an artist-muse relationship with an androgynous self-proclaimed ‘queer-witch’ and ‘disciple to Oscar Wilde’: Darwin. The title of the show refers to the definition of Dandyism put forth by the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire: a “mysterious institution” which “borders upon the spiritual and stoical.” Baudelaire says that Dandyism is “[representative] of what is finest in human pride, of that compelling need, alas only too rare today, of combating and destroying triviality… [It] is a sunset; like the declining daystar, it is glorious, without heat and full of melancholy.” Darwin is that declining daystar—an anomaly of pure expression. The multimedia work presented in Darwin, the Declining Daystar is a rejection of the status-quo and a celebration of friendship.