Euphoria Gallery
Euphoria Gallery is an artistic presentation space for art and ideas made from or about the liminal spaces. Here, we see beyond the usual social constructs. We recognize that social constructs of gender, sexuality, race, and political borders are inchoate. Derived from the term of “Gender Euphoria,” or feeling authentically aligned in one’s embodiment, the Euphoria we seek to promote centers on joy, complicating the reductive, and uplifting voices outside the conventional.
This space is for engaging in the discourse of the complicated reality of being in a world of binaries and rigid limitations that impose hierarchies, which we believe are inherently violent. We champion the narratives and expressions of joy from the marginalized spaces, even as they are wrapped in the realities of grief, oppression, and erasure. We are actively working to deconstruct the impacts and effects of colonization, to create a world that is more honest and compassionate and real.
Up Coming Shows
Common Misconceptions That Plague Us
Connie Salvayon
Through a multimedia meditation on oneness, Connie Salvayon challenges the concept that any of us are truly alone. Salvayon playfully prods at convention, ushering the viewer through a kaleidoscope of materials, and bold, child-like colors and gesture. It's hard to not feel both repulsed and endeared by a gut-tickling vulnerability. Nevertheless, there is a clear earnestness about the underlying suggestion: we are all interconnected.
Salvayon employs a menagerie of material including hair, both from the artist and their lovers, makeup and cloth, wood and glass. Monolithic ceramic sculptures haunt the foreground, marked by rich patterns and rough symmetry. Salvayon’s abstracted forms call to mind the body, in an alien-like subversion of familiarity. The works are intersex in form. Some just bones. Some just skin. Makeup is used like graffiti, loosened from the
salons of beauty to a loud vibrant mark-maker. Salvayon deconstructs the ideas of what separates us, by highlighting the shared-ness of being human, and playful rebuking social norms. One terrifying human-like sculpture sticks out both its tongues, as if in on the joke.
In the background, Salvayon intersperces fabrics from their home among sculptures made in out of work hours: bedsheets they’ve slept on and not washed–their dead skin cells among the fabric. Is it art or the artist themself? Behind one ceramic sculpture, hangs a blanket crocheted by their long-dead maternal grandmother. Collaborating with the dead, the artists manifests an ode to the reality that we are not just one, but an unfolding lineage.
Further, there is a bid for symbolic thought and dreamlike thinking, as the artist includes watercolor paintings made during their own time in art therapy, installed in Jungian Sand Trays turned shadowboxes. The colors of the clear blue sky and classic woodstain echo across the space, once again blurring edges and allowing for the freedom of dreamlike abstraction. The illusion of perceived separateness being broken continues: the therapist is also the patient. The private is made public. The artist directly asks the viewer to make a mark on one collaborative sculpture, making this a collective work. Just like, Salvayon argues, everything is.
The idea of oneness is contrary to the dominant cultures that rule life in the contemporary United States. However, the global pandemic, was greater than America its perceptions. Much of these works were made at home, while the artist was sequestered into isolation in a new city where they were devastatingly alone. In 2020 Salvayon saw the world align in horrifying synchronicity as the entire world was hit by a singular, microscopic terror. In a life-altering wave of profound connection and extreme isolation. Salvayon spent weeks working masked or in empty art studios, in their apartment, on their cramped apartment balcony. Then they lived among the sculptures for years, meditating on how to help themself and all of us feel less alone.
Connie Salvayon (They/Them) is a multidisciplinary artist and psychotherapist based in Los Angeles. Salvayon lives joyfully outside of the binaries and enjoys the dialectical spaces of tragedy and triumph, empowerment and repulsion. As a non-binary person, they have the great advantage of experiencing the world outside of the reductiveness of many social constructs. They completed their undergraduate studio art studies at Hunter College and their MSW at NYU. Salvayon currently works in private practice, specializing in working with queer people in non-traditional relationships.
Past Shows
Elementary
Group Exhibition
