Loreum is an alias, a molecularized persona disseminated across the work of American artist Tyler Eash. Deriving from ‘Lore’ – meaning folklore or knowledge of a particular group or Culture – Loreum is the name of a crystallizing desire, the labyrinthine identity of a body becoming myth, living in the interstices between reality and fantasy. 

In his first solo exhibition at NICOLETTI, London, Eash registers and redistributes fragments of Loreum’s exis-tence in a new series of paintings, drawings, sculptures and film. They tell the story of a being born of the sea foam, of a self-mythologized entity embracing dissonance (of class, gender, sexuality and self) as a means to erode uncomfort-able truths and upturn reality – that of an American dream gone awry. Throughout the exhibition, recurring motifs and symbols such as horses, car engines, windshields, motor-cycle handlebars, corn fields and meth pipes point to the reality experienced by an increasingly marginalised working class struggling with poverty, incarceration, homelessness and addiction. Alluding to Loreum’s background and early life, elements characteristics of a certain Americana aesthetics are nevertheless filtered through a queering lens to shift reality through a self-aware theatricality, whereby Eash fictionalizes his past, examines the present, and fantasizes the future.