SANTA FE — There have to be 1000’s of tiny, pastel-colored, overlapping butterfly stickers in Amaryllis R. Flowers’s “Wayfinder” (2025). The irregularly formed work on paper, featured within the artist’s positively illuminating exhibition Pursuing Defeat at Hecho a Mano, additionally features a maze of black and white eyeball stickers, creating snaking trails which might be accented on occasion with plastic googly eyes. Within the nook of the scene, a bald, blue-skinned determine crouches earlier than a black abyss, eyes and mouth agape, holding a magenta-colored fiery torch. The paintings’s excessive deckled edges recommend that it is a peek into a bigger, unending story.
Haven’t we every felt like cowering in a nook when all eyes are on us and a plague of butterflies invades our stomachs? No, simply me? And but, the determine isn’t cowering. As an alternative, she’s wanting up at her choices, wide-eyed, with that trusty torch to gentle her manner. “Calendar” (2025) depicts two comparable figures, feeling their manner by way of a pink and purple cave, who encounter a bunch of floating, disembodied blue heads — ghosts, ancestors maybe, or any otherworldly beings who appear simply as stunned to see the explorers because the explorers are to see them. In “Flashlight” (2025), electrical blue-purple gouache and glitter on black paper compose layers of underground tunnels in what may be a diamond mine. Nude our bodies slither previous heart-shaped faceted gems, whereas others stand en masse, wielding pole axes. A big face snarls and opens her mouth to expel flames.
These three works and extra showcase an inventive follow that “creates an environment of psychic revolt, allowing us to take pleasure in spaces we’ve been taught to feel ashamed,” writes Flowers, who identifies as queer and Puerto Rican-American.
Amaryllis Flowers, “No Man’s Land” (2023), acrylic, blind embossment, airbrush, gouache, collage, and craft supplies on archival paper
The storytelling and world-building qualities of her work profit from the immersive nature of set up, however the choice of singular works in Pursuing Defeat serves as an attractive sampling, like pages from a feminist fairytale or screenshots of a femme fantasy online game. In her 2023 Joan Mitchell Basis “In the Studio” interview, Flowers says that she thinks about monster mythology and autonomy as they relate to the all-too-human expertise of feeling undesirable and misplaced: “So for those people who struggle with feeling like they shouldn’t be here, I just want to make work that helps them feel like they want to die less, or even just the willingness to be alive more.”
Flowers reveals her monstrous empathy and lust for all times in her drawings by way of prismatic, fantastical depictions of colourful towering figures with third eyes and large tongues; spaceships hovering above rugged terrain and speeding rivers; collections of bejeweled instruments, weapons, and pointy guitars. Her beneficiant use of iridescence in works equivalent to “No Man’s Land” (2023) indicators a resistance to at least one state of being and as an alternative embodies a dynamic, shapeshifting sensual power. Plastic letter beads, charms, equivalent miniature child bottles, and faux tooth add mass enchantment to “Feel Good Forgotten Map for Falling Through the Cracks” (2025). The 2 brown-skinned ladies in “ENTER GAME” (2025), surrounded by shimmery iridescent streamers, stand their floor and maintain both finish of an outsized furcula, poised to interrupt the “rules” and make a want.
Amaryllis Flowers, “Calendar” (2025), gouache, airbrush, acrylic, and craft supplies on archival paper
Amaryllis Flowers, “Flashlight” (2025), gouache and glitter on archival paper
Amaryllis Flowers, “ENTER GAME” (2025), acrylic medium, gouache, watercolor, airbrush, and craft supplies on archival paper
Amaryllis Flowers, “COMPASS” (2015), artificial human hair, Jacquard loom, black thread
Pursuing Defeat continues at Hecho a Mano (129 West Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico) by way of March 3. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.