Co-Prosperity is excited to announce the exhibition, Moon Healing Escalation, by Bay Area-based multimedia artist Gericault De La Rose. The exhibition will take place April 26 – June 7 at Co-Prosperity’s window vitrines. Opening reception is April 26th, 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM. This will be De La Rose’s first solo exhibition in Chicago.
Adorning the window vitrines with lustrous satin, rhinestones, sequins, and glitters, Moon Healing Escalation, composed of both previous work and new creations, is a ritualistic triptych that unfolds as a passage that bridges the past and the present through magical and spiritual transcendence. The window exhibition invites the viewers into a celebration of love and friendship, a liminal space where beautiful metamorphosis is constantly being materialized. It is nonetheless also a deeply personal installation for De La Rose to look back at her life, ingest her past trauma as a trans woman surviving in this world, and trace the journey of her healing imbued with support and compassion from her community.
The first work is a mark of history, of something old. Severance includes two larger-than-life tapestries the artist made for a previous performance. Loosely draped from the wall by the top corners, the jacquard-loom-woven fabrics are soft photographs that show the exposed bellies of De La Rose’s parents: Her mom’s stretched marks from her pregnancies juxtaposed to her dad’s scar from an operation. In De La Rose’s previous performance, the artist wore a jacquard overall that showed an image of her own scarred body. She pulled on the threads to unravel the hanging tapestries, creating wrinkles, folds, but also irreversible damage to the laboriously made weaves. These ruptures are visible in the display and the suit will also be shown in the installation.
Scars should be celebrated as the body’s history, its perseverance and resilience, time-marked by vitality. Scars, of which the past tense is wounds, visible and invisible, literal and metaphorical, thread through this exhibition that endorses them as portals to possibilities and openings for umbilical cords to form new and strong bonds. Reveal, the centerpiece, is a new ambitious performance that draws the connection between magical girl transformations, drag, and transition. The performance is inspired by Sailor Moon, the Japanese manga series and anime that has enraptured the hearts and imaginations of fans around the world with its embodiment of courage, compassion, and camaraderie. One of the most memorable moments in this anime is undoubtedly the magical girl transformations, where the adventurous protagonists go through spectacular bodily upgrades from daring middle-schoolers to powerful guardians of the Earth. Reveal considers these liminal moments and reframes them as rituals of passage in a queer context. Shrouded by glittering embellishments, ornaments, wig hair, and radiant fabric, De La Rose will perform drag to high-energy hyperpop music, enacting the moment of phenomenal rebirth like how a butterfly leaves its cocoon.
The final panel of the triptych consists of a brand-new tapestry and prints the artist makes for this exhibition. A panel dedicated to found and chosen family, Tethered is a piece of weaving—made in a similar process as that of Severance—with images of the artist’s and her friends’ hands, nodding to the hand signs prominently featured in Sailor Moon’s magical girl transformations. The tapestry is framed by colorful prints produced by De La Rose’s signature dermatographia skin stamping technique. Dermatographia is a skin condition for which the skin is prone to pressure and will produce a welt in the shape of the applied external force. Creatively turning this condition to her advantage, De La Rose uses her skin as a canvas and printing surface. In Tangled, she invites her friends to each describe their friendships or their first encounters and to write these words with fingertips directly onto her skin. After Time does her magic, the slightly elevated skin surface becomes a printing block that can yield a few prints before the swelling clears out. Conversing with the permanent scars recorded and commemorated in Severance, dermatographic prints evoke temporary scars that are themselves expressions of love and acceptance. Like temporary tattoos but only in reverse, De La Rose uses this body print technique as a poetic vehicle to mark “tattoos” as proofs of touch and intimacy, of her presence in relation to others, and of her body—a body that has suffered and will suffer but chooses to only suffer fabulously. - Nicky Ni
Gericault De La Rose is a queer trans Filipinx, multidisciplinary artist, and educator. While developing her art practice, she worked as a Co-curator of Philippine Objects at the Field Museum of Natural History where she organized a series of monthly events called Pamanang Pinoy using the objects within the collection as conduits for community discussion. After graduating with a BFA with an emphasis in Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she formed an artist collective, Export Quality, together with other Queer Filipinx alumni. De La Rose has also showcased her work in group shows in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Johnson City, New York, Toronto, and Oakland. De La Rose attended the ACRE residency in Steuben, Wisconsin and the HATCH artist residency for the Chicago Artist Coalition in 2020. Most recently in 2022, she received the San Francisco Foundation’s Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award and received her MFA from UC Berkeley in 2023.