VYCZIE DORADO
Where Sleeping Dogs Lie

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present Vyczie Dorado’s first solo exhibition, Where Sleeping Dogs Lie, bringing together over twenty of Dorado’s meticulous mixed media works which carefully culminate on paper, canvas, and in sculptural arrangements that twist mediums into one another. Their at first playful sensibility, featuring entrancing environments and androgynous creatures who live in a world that is only a partial reality slowly become skewed as the viewer notices in the painstaking renderings minute details which leave us discombobulated. This head scratch moment is Dorado’s magic, where a mass of mark making accumulates into a dreamlike moment that is often signaled by spectral elements.

These features and foundations upon which the work stands however; are as clever as they are genuine, and one can vividly feel that their alchemy is one only brought about by fear, pain, and suffering. They are a fever dream of endless possibilities and realms that are conjured in those times of desperation when our only option is to let go, and at the same time hold on. This is where we, the viewer, find our relation to them and to the world at large; through their hints of loneliness, and their comments and questions on identity, gender, and the navigation of harsh realities that in our era seem never ending.

In To Do Todaloo, a spotlit figure is riddled with Post-It notes, as it lays there in an overwhelming pile of tasks, while in Mattress, a tiny room from an awry perspective the figure seems to have disappeared, it’s imprint corroded into the sleeping apparatus from excessive overuse. In our nature we think of space and time as these big, elusive entities whereas the artist here breaks these vast elements down into fractions as seen in works like, Wash, Found In The Center, and A Walk Around The Cup-De-Sac. It’s a ferris wheel, a Google loading icon, a rainbow, a mirage; such is life, such is a wish many times to be elsewhere, and ultimately in an attempt to cope, submerge our realities in fiction. This exhibition and the fountain of Dorado’s artistic inception is in dedication to her late mother.

I fear death and the unknown, but You are the light in the celestial uncertainty.

You show nothing, and nothing is illuminated outside of you in the vast undisclosed shadow of what comes after

Today, but knowing I will have your company,

I am warmed.

I’ve learned nothing about the Unknown in the last 13 years, but occasionally graze its hand and when its stillness stuns me in place, knowing You’re shining within its endless borders,

I am consoled.

Because though the Empty that you reside in offers me no answers in life, You are the constant that I will be safe with in death.

When our meeting will be is undetermined, but the celest with one star will get two on the tragic day of my arrival.

And it’ll be sad, but won’t it be pretty?

And our family will cry, but we won’t be lonely.

-Vyczie Dorado