Amaryllis R. Flowers' 'Pursuing Defeat' proves the strength of fantasy at Hecho a Mano

SANTA FE — Is living in a fantasy world always bad? What if we only visit? In her solo exhibition, “Pursuing Defeat,” Amaryllis R. Flowers opens a portal to a glittery, pearlescent, lavender fairyland where anyone feeling defeated by life, or simply blue, can find rejuvenation. It’s escapism as a strategy for survival.

Flowers’ characteristic femme figures — sometimes sprouting mystical third eyes, sometimes nude and wielding electric guitars that shoot flames — tumble and bounce on “My Little Pony-ish” flared legs through what she calls “environments of psychic revolt.” Like Henry Darger’s nonbinary “Vivian Girls,” they fight intergalactic battles against colonialism and patriarchy.

Although Flowers currently lives and works in upstate New York, she spent some of her formative years in Santa Fe, where she took her first art classes. You may recognize her work from the exhibition “Broken Boxes” at the Albuquerque Museum, on view through Sunday, March 2.

Amaryllis R. Flowers' 'Pursuing Defeat' proves the strength of fantasy at Hecho a Mano

Stylistically, Flowers combines the unabashedly “girly” look of Lily van der Stokker’s Barbie-pink art with the middle-school scrapbook sensibility of Wendy White and the otherworldly feminist tableaus of Chitra Ganesh. Her bric-a-brac materials — vending machine teeth, puff paint, googly eyes, glitter, plastic baby bottle charms, holographic Easter grass and candy raver beads — connect her to Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, the Stonewall Uprising participant and granddaddy of underground queer art, who cobbled subversive rococo altarpieces from cellophane candy wrappers, glitter and linoleum beginning in the 1960s.

For readers who find art like this as incomprehensible as Gen Z slang, don’t let yourself be fooled by the schlocky Dollar Store materials, puff paint and pink glitter. Flowers might make her collage paintings with the same fun, shiny stuff that kids like to play with, but it’s absolutely not something “your kid could do.”

Notice how Flowers repeats figures to create masterful illusions of motion and speed, much as the futurist painters once did. See how she shifts scale to embed pocket-sized vignettes within larger narrative scenes, like flashbacks and flash-forwards in a time-jumping novel. See how she signifies different levels of reality through her material choices alone, the highlighter and Sharpie passages signaling stream-of-consciousness monologues, which interpret and comment upon the more thickly-textured, plasticky external worlds. Flowers not only elevates her materials but deploys them as brilliantly complex storytelling devices.

One may draw parallels between Flowers’ work and other maximalist psychedelic artists from Sigmar Pölke to Lauren Halsey and Katherine Sepúlveda — perhaps even to Pendleton Ward’s cult animated television series “The Midnight Gospel.”

But Flowers’ artistic voice is so unmistakably her own that she can absorb all influences, past and present, without being overshadowed by them. She has constructed a multiverse out of fantasies, myths and fractured memories, using the colors and materials of teenage rebellion. It is a vision rooted in her own lived experience as a queer, mixed-race Puerto Rican woman, as well as her research into various cosmological systems, from medieval alchemy to Caribbean surrealism. It is also a vision that many viewers, regardless of cultural background or knowledge base, can see themselves in.

“Pursuing Defeat” takes me back to my own teenage years — my innocence, impudence and angst; my escapist daydreams and awkward attempts at creative expression in secret journals and math class doodles.

It also propels me forward. Flowers’ art pictures an alternative future, a brighter one, which, corny as it sounds, just might be possible if we can reconnect with whatever portion of our imagination hasn’t been stomped out by the burdens of adulthood. At the very least, it’s a fun place to visit.