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The question of how death—that paradoxical universal experience to end all experience—can be understood by the living, has fascinated Tyler Akers for a long time. Born in 1989, the artist came of age as the AIDS crisis had ravaged the United States, taking the lives of several generations of gay ancestors. It was a world of mass death that was first met by silence and then symbolized by all manner of memento mori, reminders of the immanent death that was everywhere. Old historical symbols—raw skulls, extinguished candles, withered fruits and flowers—took on a renewed and particularly solemn significance. At the same time, as he came of age Akers’ his astrophysics-obsessed father would tell him stories about the mysteries of the cosmos: the oddities of an ever-expanding universe, quantum entanglement, dark energy, and distant quasars. It is against this background that Akers reckons with mortality by imagining its inverse, following in the footsteps of Steven Arnold, Jack Brusca, and Yannis Tsarouchis by deploying angels in requiem as inter-dimensional guardians or liberated souls on the path to infinitude.

A brave faction of artists and activists working during the AIDS crisis sought to show the abject horror of illness to inspire action against the social and political forces preventing or slowing awareness or the development treatments. “Although the story of AIDS activism is one of heroism, it actually starts in suffering,” Sarah Schulman  writes in Let the Record Show (A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987-1993), “AIDS without medication is a grotesque display of loss. Every faculty disintegrates: the brain, the lungs, the nerves in one’s legs, the ability to hold shit, the tongue covered in thrush, the broken skin. Even the normally unconsidered capacity to swallow and then retain nutrition disappears. The body is no longer a mystery of synchronicity; it is a trap of literal pain and confusion, but also of social isolation.” It became important in that moment to expose a viscous reality—to force an ignorant public to face its cruel failure to react. A period of extreme darkness, it left many living in its wake. Afterward came the imperative for those in mourning to imagine an afterlife free from the suffering they and their loved ones had endured—a disembodied space of metaphysical relief and spiritual communion.

Inspired by the Appalachian Folk Art heritage of West Virginia, his birthplace, and the illuminated manuscripts of Gnostic and Byzantine traditions, Akers’s heavenly messengers are stylized in flat, intricate patterns with gilded haloes, gliding majestically in gestural waves of blue spacetime. On one hand, Akers seeks to invoke an ancestral consciousness that doesn’t position himself as having had their dire experiences, and on the other, rejects the contemporary “queer figurative” aesthetic of a romantically blissful here-and-now. Against the larger context in New York of the quotidian scenes in figurative painting, he does not care to illustrate his private life, instead sublimating the despair in the decimation of his previous generations, his everyday anxieties, and the ever-present promise of death into a soothing vision of eternity.

This series of works takes inspiration from the ‘star-painted ceiling’ of the Scrovegni Chapel from the early 14th century in Padua. It is Giotto’s largest use of lapis lazuli, a rich field of blue pigment with a pattern of gold stars to imagine the splendor of infinite space on its arched ceiling accompanied by the corporeality and  gravitas of religious scenes in frescos on its walls—the harmony of sky and ground, heaven and earth. It is in this spirit Akers stacks spangled canvases layered with rectangular holes cut into them to imagine the unknown—envisioning, through allegory, a divine afterlife and the mysteries of deep space from a terrestrial position. His work offers stargazing as a form of elegy, as the act of earthly mourning with eyes cast toward heaven and the Empyrean transcendence of ultimate ego death.

Tyler Akers (b. 1989) is an artist and writer based in New York and originally from West Virginia. His work, inspired by a generation of artists lost to the AIDS crisis, mostly consists of installations of sculptural paintings of stars and angels on stacked layers of canvases. With degrees in Art History and New Media Studies from Savannah College of Art and Design, he completed an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing at School of Visual Arts in 2014. In addition to making art, he writes about art regularly, and currently serves as Arts Editor at Gayletter Magazine. His work has been shown at galleries in West Virginia, Georgia, and New York.