Exhibition Text
Flor: Kiki—A Sky of Changing Lights
A painting depicts a queer monarch butterfly named Kiki, taking a sip from an unattended Aperol Spritz at a discotheque. The background lights shift colors, refracted on bodies moving. The spritz sits on a confetti glitter table alongside a copy of Disidentifications by José Esteban Muñoz. A few seconds later, Kiki becomes a dancing queen.
Who is Kiki, you might ask? Kiki is a queer monarch butterfly that likes to go to the discotheque. Wandering & longing to belong, Kiki finds clues for kinship throughout the urban landscape. Following the scent of something familiar yet unknown–an Aperol Spritz–she stumbles onto a dancefloor where she finally finds the space for moves & gestures of her own… Kiki la dancing queen… after a night out at the club Kiki finds comfort on a hammock spun by a friendly spider for her. The texture of these silky threads brings her memories of dreams when she embodied other forms.
In their paintings, Flor allows Kiki to flutter away from whatever preconceptions we might have about monarch butterflies. Flor recalls seeing images of monarchs in protest posters carried by Dreamers & on murals in Pilsen, Chicago, where they live. They wondered if the monarch ever got tired of carrying these narratives of multigenerational migration, of survival, change, & beauty. Flor gives Kiki space to find & embody her multiplicities, a place to rest from imposed societal roles & narratives. Flor opens a window for Kiki who didn’t quite fit in with the rest of her monarch group… a queer butterfly who is somehow bad at migrating, struggling, & performing her “monarch” roles. Kiki is a dream space for queer narrative stories about our bodies, environments, & relationships. About our need not only for survival & places to rest but also a space to allow ourselves to manifest endless joy, to conjure the world & relationships we need beyond survival. All done with a fantastical twist because we all need bedtime stories to dream up new possibilities…
Flor likes to give their subjects, materials, & themes they work with equal agency over their language & representation. How does Flor do that? They channel Kiki, a conceptual personae. Flor employs rituals to embody her… a spray of perfume, a Kiki playlist playing in the background, a Kiki dance in between brushstrokes… Flor becoming Kiki subverts authorship. From there, the paintings develop their own intuitive language by breaking in & out of symmetry, playing with mirrorings, & mimicking her changing environment. Kiki is always shifting forms, so she likes to be painted in many different ways… exploring ways of seeing, perceiving, & multi-sensing. What is it to see & sense like a queer monarch butterfly, who likes to dance, to befriend other queer beings? Kiki’s journey is about queer belonging… what is it like to dream & manifest new potentialities?
Hi, my name is Flor. I am a conceptual artist working through painting, performance & poetry. My works are proposals for queer belongings, new modes of expressing & relating to one another. Some themes & subjects in my works are: Flowers as a stand-in for myself (Flor); Kiki, a queer monarch butterfly that loves the discotheque–Kiki is also a framework for collaborations that foster queer migratory experiences; “X” an Epic poem about the letter X, as in Latinx & its other uses as a gesture of erasure, inclusion, voidance, & as a placeholder for a language that is yet to come, interwoven with my migratory experience through languages & spaces.
I have recently exhibited (solo) at Chicago Artists Coalition, ADDS DONNA, BAR4000, Heaven Gallery, & performances at Gallery 400 & the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. I have been featured in reviews & publications such as Artmaze, Sixty Inches From Center, New American Paintings, Chicago Artist Writers, & Monsters & Dust. In 2021 I was selected as a “Breakout Artists 2021: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers” by Newcity Art.
Everybody is a gallery in Tucson, AZ that primarily works with emerging and perpetually-emerging artists. Its beginnings in Tucson started as a warehouse project space from 2016-2018, followed by an iteration in Chicago, IL from 2019-2020. Its activity has been featured by Newcity Art, Vulture, Contemporary Art Daily, ART news, Art Viewer, Autre Magazine, Tzvetnik, Arizona Public Media, SFAQ, among others. Everybody is a member of the New Art Dealers Alliance.
