This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.
See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred
Inside the Universalist Unitarian Church of Riverside, a line of masked people filed into the red-lighted chapel, one by one, to take part in the rite of confession.
The private booth was framed in flowers, and rather than a priest listening inside, it was a microphone recording their confessions, to be played at an upcoming art exhibition. The brick triangle-roofed church that held the booth has stood since opening in 1892; that night, it was the site of a masquerade, or as Riverside artist Perry Picasshoe called it, the “Masqueerade.”
Picasshoe, whose real name is Neveah Marquez, hosted the event, which had an entirely LGBTQ+ guest list and one requirement: Bring a mask, whatever that looks like to you.
Marquez, a 26-year-old transgender woman robed entirely in red, stood at the pews and danced to the experimental electronic DJ sets and drag performances as guests entered in masks that ranged from papier-mâché deer antlers to collaged photos of eyes and lips.
The event came as a celebration ahead of the Riverside native’s first solo exhibition, “SagradX,” which will open Saturday at Riverside Art Museum and remain through Jan. 31.
The recorded confessions, layered over one another until they become an unintelligible cacophony, represent just one piece of the 25 paintings, photographs and interactive displays in the exhibition. The show explores the meaning of “sacred” as Marquez documents her most private places and experiences, and asks viewers to consider what they hold sacred.
The exhibition, she says, began with heartbreak.
“The first time I started thinking about sacredness … was when my ex-partner brought somebody into our bed,” said Marquez.
“I was crying, distraught, and drove over to these hills over Lake Mathews [in Riverside] and I realized: The bedroom was sacred to me. That’s why it hurt so much. And I started thinking, if it wasn’t sacred to them, how do we decide what is sacred to each of us?”
The very headboard of that bed sits in the exhibition; on it, Marquez painted fairy-tale creatures representing the lovers gallivanting across the woods.
While Marquez’s experience with betrayal sparked the idea, the exhibition explores sanctity in many different scenarios: In one, the artist plays with the concept of the digital safe space by inviting guests to look through her phone as she is tied on a handmade iron-wrought cross. Inside the exhibition space, she uses a small painter’s brush to slowly paint the white walls red over the course of the show.
In curating the exhibition, Marquez began to look inward, painting and photographing herself in ways she never had before: through the lens of femininity. She lived the previous 26 years of her life as a man, growing up religious to the point that she once considered becoming a priest. The paintings serve as portals into a part of her that she long held inside.
“I describe it like having blurry vision your whole life and not realizing how clearly you can see, until you put glasses on,” Marquez said. “That’s how painting myself as a woman felt.”
