This is a mythical tale with beauty, monsters, gardens, caves, secrets, luster and never, ever a close. It arrives from the amorphous place where many timeless stories take shape, in the turbulent mind of one who attempts to make art and comprehend their history at once, or perhaps vice versa. The chambers we move through mirror those of Vest’s mental architecture, treading warily, but inescapably through swirling colors, elaborate chimera, shimmering garb, dark imaginings, and texture, always, everywhere texture. It as if thoughts have overflowed the skull and cascaded out through every cranial pore, materializing in the form of hair that spans colors and context to churn, toil, deviate and take flight. Like a restless river of consciousness, the personal phantasmagoria of Immerse is short in distance but vast in suggestion – torn between epic aspirations, personal obsessions, and the whispers that natter and gnaw in the subconscious. We are greeted here by elemental mutants; the disturbing majesty when culture and nature lay down their oppositions and move into and through one another. Much catharsis ensues, as every succeeding chamber wrestles with knots of grandeur and guilt – where heavenly maidens and effervescent jewels confront the shadows they cast; always larger the closer they get to the light. Humanity has tried to make sense of these archetypal struggles through many eras and means – gods, deities, theories, creeds and orators we may only approach in servitude, with bowed heads, upon bended knee. These legends live in many places upon this planet and take many colorful vestments, but they all come from the same place – from the minds of mortals who have turned their imaginings into beings.

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Images by Hailey Bollinger.