Lila de Magalhaes: Laps of Chrysalis

The pupa stage unfolds in the murk of the chrysalis, a lightless enclosure where space and time condense into pulses of wet, warm, supple pressure. The enclosure is self-sustaining, instinctively capable of breaking down organs and neural tissues and building new ones in their place. What’s between the caterpillar and the butterfly is a well-documented metabolic process. But it’s also a thing, a sensate body that’s delicately morphing into another. There’s an intelligence underlying its goopy, anatomical flux. 

De Magalhaes’s exhibition honors this kind of regenerative, fluid way of learning and knowing. Through each of her works, liquidity carries its own forms of logic. It observes and incubates, births and rebirths, nurturing transformation and arousing new relationalities among creatures who take laps in and of it. To dive, soak, lick, yank, and slosh about with lovers, strangers, predators, and friends is also to grow more into oneself. 

The artist’s bed sheet fabric works stage a constellation of interspecies encounters in feathery washes of dye and precisely limned curves of thread. As a symbiosis flows amongst beings, the order of things becomes unruly. Tiny bodies dip and swirl through a primordial bubbling brew. A woman plunges into a watery crater while massive insects lovingly clutch her buttocks and finger the tendrils of her braids. A steaming shit plays host to an orgiastic polycule of flies and other winged critters. An overgrown poodle breaks rank, dragging its human sub by their leash and collar. A spider snatches a cheeky handful of flesh. They’re all swept up in their own tides of change, whether confronting their fears, inverting tired power dynamics, choosing new families, or succumbing to irrepressible erotic drives. In The Eden Project, a woman eagerly plies a jolly worm with kisses while a community of snails and bugs gather in their midst. As a weathered floating head looks on, a young insect scrawls dutifully in its notebook, reminding us of the moral of the story: for love to be shared with others, it has to be learned and absorbed collectively. These creatures are all teaching each other.

Money can’t buy that kind of psychological satiation, but de Magalhaes’s ceramic vessels imagine how it might be liquified, bottled, and branded as a set of lavish potions and lotions. Each sculpture’s exterior is inscribed with its own narrative world, advertising the set of ineffable feelings and desires contained within. Some sell the promise of uninhibited pleasures while others warn of mismanaged expectations or invoke pangs of existential dread. Still others pay homage to the exceptional weirdness of ordinary things, like the smell in the corner of that room.

In the womb-like confines of Last Night, a number of the exhibition’s recurring characters emerge in glazed ceramic, tranquilly poised for their curtain call. In a tight row, they sleep with limbs entangled, spooning each other tenderly. They’ve made a shared home in the warm red environs of this stage, at least until the next stage begins. 

Among the surges, churns, and flows of de Magalhaes’s tableaux are reminders that seeing oneself change can feel terrifying, emboldening, or sometimes like nothing at all. But whatever it feels like, there’s a freedom in lability. There’s power in the willingness to inhabit unstable contours, to embrace the gloppy thickness between phases of being. Metamorphosis is a practice, a way of orienting oneself to the world, a form of participation in earthly ritual that propels evolution, willing it into existence and making it material. 

And after all this, if at some point it feels like the end, it’s not really. The cycle always begins again.

— Jeanne Dreskin