DUPLEX PRESENTS

Erika Rios Hickle

I WOULD CEASE TO BE (I/II)

I WOULD CEASE TO BE (I)

MAR 5 - APR 2, 2023

DUPLEX, 17 ESSEX ST, NYC

OPENING SUNDAY, MAR 5, 6 - 8 PM

I WOULD CEASE TO BE (II)

opens at Apartment 13, Providence, Rhode Island,

on March 30th, 2023, coinciding with the

closing weekend of I WOULD CEASE TO BE (I)

at DUPLEX, 17 Essex St, NYC.

 


I WOULD CEASE TO BE

God

dissolved

my mind – my separation.

I cannot describe my intimacy with Him.

How dependent is your body’s life on water and food and air?

I said to God, ‘ I will always be unless you cease to Be,’

And my Beloved replied, ‘And I

would cease to Be

if you

died.’

“I Would Cease To Be” by St. Teresa Avila

 
 



 

DUPLEX is pleased to present Erika Rios Hickle: I Would Cease To Be (I). In a new series of mixed media wall works and sculptures inspired by St. Teresa de Avila’s influential text The Interior Castle, Rios Hickle explores her own visual interpretation of the religious figure, most famously eroticized in Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Baroque altarpiece “The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.” 

A 16th century Spanish mystic, religious reformer, and prolific writer, St. Teresa defended bodily devotion. She described her experiences of divine ecstasy during bouts of illness in which her body and consciousness dissolved, leaving only the pain and joy of a sublime union with God. Rios Hickle was first introduced to The Interior Castle as a teen, when her grandmother revealed that their family was related to the Saint through a maternal Mexican lineage. Rios Hickle’s grandmother was a practicing Catholic healer, providing relief to her American-Mexican community through collective prayer. Rios Hickle remembers the power of these sessions and the feelings of miraculousness she herself experienced during intense invocations of the Virgin Mary.

Perceiving female mysticism, prayer, and ecstasy as defiant acts of freedom against the patriarchal hegemony of the Catholic Church, I Would Cease To Be (I) intertwines images of the artist with the famous saint, honoring Rios Hickle’s ancestral legacy and exposing the complicated relationships between piety, sexuality, mortality, pain, and pleasure. Referencing domestic interiors and architectural motifs of Mexican Catholic Churches, Rios Hickle combines remnants of old, sun-bleached, moth eaten, and torn fabric, with photography, drawing, and collage to form her own makeshift alters reflecting an archive of collective maternal history. Simultaneously becoming and disappearing, the altars bring viewers into contact with St. Teresa’s miraculous experience which took place at a moment when her body and mind was at the brink of death. Spanning two physical locations in New York City at DUPLEX and in Providence, RI at Apartment 13, Rios Hickle mimics sites of religious pilgrimage in which images of the artist’s and Saint’s disjointed body parts transform into holy relics.

I Would Cease to Be (II) opens at Apartment 13 on March 30th, 2023. The exhibition will overlap the closing weekend I Would Cease to Be (I) at DUPLEX. 

 

 

BIO

Erika Rios Hickle is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA, from Cal. State Long Beach in 2008 and her MFA from Rutgers University in 2012. She has shown at American Medium, 321 Gallery, Kimberly Klark and Geary in New York, Resort in Baltimore, DarkZone in New Jersey, Apt. 13 in Rhode Island, and most recently at the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art, MA; Bureau, NYC and Catbox Contemporary, NYC.