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The videos document the responses of six collaborators working from a prompt supplied by Rae. From this, the artists Eli Erlick, Aave, Rahne Alexander, Soleil, Bao Nguyen, and Alex D’Agostino create interpretations of the idea of a portal within their respective forms of work through weekly performances. For many of the artists, these gateways serve as a point of departure and invitation, focusing on forms of different portions of the body, activated with a green screen effect to create a moving three dimensional space inside the videos.

Each Friday during the run of the show features performances from the artists, in accompaniment to the video installations—these range from spoken word, to movement based, to completely silent, or with music. The night I visited the exhibition, I saw the performances of Alex D’Agostino, Rahne Alexander, and Red Rae themselves. As the performers prepared, I investigated the gallery on a scavenger hunt for various secret portals, in addition to the ones present in the video work. This is a side activity in the exhibition, with small objects hidden in nondescript locations throughout the space, with hints to their location in exhibition text.

Much of the subtext of Paradise Portals is formed by the artists creating pathways into their lived experience. The green screen illusion of interior space on moving objects, and the use of these new body cavities as gateways, creates a baseline of vulnerability. Intimacy, and the act of letting someone into your world, is a purposefully intimate act.

When it’s time for his performance, D’Agostino punctuates this comedically with a sniff of poppers before the ceremony begins. However, there is a gravity in seeing how each artist addresses this vulnerability, particularly during a time in which the Trans and Queer community is under threat. With D’Agostino, it is addressed through a protection spell, which manifests during his performance.

His installation incorporates a projection screen on the ground in front of a sacred witchcraft circle, complete with drawings on the floor, wax candles in the shape of phalluses, a spell-filled journal, a sword, and armor. The artist becomes the “Knight of Cruising,” as they scamper and dance in Druid Hill Park’s Cruising Forest, dressed in a thong, with the shoulder armor and the sword—in this case the sword functioning as the portal.

Cherubic and aggressive in a way that would fit into a Baz Luhrmann movie, the artist starts with an invocation of “Queer directions.” They light candles and hold them in the cardinal directions, with a different spell for each. “Hail to the Guardians of the south! Where bodies ignite and ache with memory. Burn what suffocates, light what liberates! Come kindle our rage, our dance, our orgasmic howls. Blessed be the lovers and the fighters!”

In conversation with D’Agostino after the performance, the phrase “within every person is an entire universe” stuck with me. The exhibition highlights these internal dimensions with each artist, but also with the aforementioned scavenger hunt portals. These entrances are hidden cleverly around the exhibition in overlooked spaces that I won’t spoil for the reader, and are created using mirrors and tablets. They create a random spectral void in an otherwise regular setting, often hidden among or behind something mundane.

The effect is jarring, and magical, in a dream logic reminiscent of Michel Gondry. These details are especially strong in forming a suspension of disbelief in the space, of there being an unknown magic behind the scenes. From a practical standpoint, they also encourage shy viewers to fully investigate and live in the space’s comfortable darkness, which Rae utilizes as an asset in their curatorial method.

In Eli Erlick’s video, the portal is her hand, behaving almost as a tablet while she gives detailed biographies of figures in history who were trans before our current common nomenclature gave us that name, with portraits of the historical figures displayed on the wall opposite from this installation, including Amelio Robles Ávila, the only known trans Zapatista, who famously killed two of his harassers.

Adjacent to Erlick’s video is Bao Nguyen. Nguyen’s portal was located on their back, and in their video they constantly tried to scratch it—linking cleanliness, cultural tradition of said cleanliness, and gender performance in a video shot on the banks of Jones Falls. Nguyen’s innate reference to ancestry feels spiritual and familiar next to Erlick’s specific history, with ghostly overlapping imagery.

In the front gallery at 405, Aave’s video positions her as larger than life, with the screen higher than eye level for the viewer. Aave stands in statuesque pose, facing the viewer. In keeping with her persona, the portals in this piece demand attention by beginning to shine out from beneath her eyes.

Gradually the portal envelopes her entire face, transforming it while also overlaying additional imagery—nails, costume, platforms, outer space, and finally, with Aave humorously running away from a small monster. “Running from my inner blob,” in the words of the artist, something that relates on the universal level, in addition to the inner-self critic of all performers.

Next to Aave, Rahne Alexander’s video features her whole body as a portal, except her head, as she walks around a neighborhood. She investigates memories of a changing place and the psychogeographic meditation on aging, highlighted with the slapstick effect of a green screen wetsuit. Next to this is Rae’s large installation, the centerpiece of the front room, featuring a wall constructed between two pillars, a projection of Rae dances shirtless, with a large portal on their abdomen to a soundtrack of fun electronic music by Bryce Hample and Amy Reid.

This video installation on stretched linen, plays with the idea of rebirth and celebration, which Rae referenced in their performance that night, the form slowly bursting out of a stitched area of the piece to music, playing with shadow and movement, and almost creating a form of puppetry reminiscent of an avant garde electronic music festivals.

The effect is meditative, and before they begin, Rae jokes that each year they’d go to Nebraska for the Arts Farms residency, and tell all of their friends they were preparing not to exist, as trans identity is not recognized in Nebraska law. This preamble sets the tone for their rebirth in the piece with a joyful intentionality.

D’Agostino, Aave, Rae, and Alexander’s work exhibit a fair amount of camp, with some of the emotional impact present in their portals coated with humor, but it doesn’t lessen their impact. Instead, these works feel more authentic this way, like a fact of life, similar to the tension building to laughter at a funeral or unintended giggles when someone says grace.

Behind Alexander’s video is the work of Soleil, in which they sleep like a satisfied bumblebee in a large flower, a portion of their forehead acting as the portal, its placement referencing a chakra. This is the most calming piece in the show, as Soliel demonstrates the arrival at stillness, solitude, warmth, and healing. This particular corner of area 405 almost invites this; it’s dark, somewhat tucked away, and not in the line of movement through the rest of the gallery, making apparent through these choices the intention of Soleil’s portal to demonstrate an inner peace and maternal self love.

In Alexander’s performance, the final one of the evening, she rifles through junk mail and reads from a letter that seems to be written to herself. She does this after pantomiming coming in from doing yard work, which she signifies by holding a pair of snips. She starts the performance with humming the opening bars to the Addams Family Theme Song, with which somehow everyone in the audience instinctively participated, rhythmically snapping at the end the first phrase.

The performance unfolds as an anecdote-laden meditation on the transformation of place. In poetic spoken word, Alexander describes locations of old gay bars and memories of nightlife, the conflicts of pretension with peers—”She insisted that I wasn’t saying Asia Argento correctly”—with the heartbreaking banality of what these places have become. “You now pick up your prescriptions from the place that the Disney Queen spilled a drink on you.”

Punctuating this is Alexander’s repeated refrain of “Everyone loves a de*d tr*nny,” invocating the objectification and martyrdom of trans people, and the establishment cynicism of only advocating for a community after they have already been eradicated.

In the face of increasing anti-Trans legislature, a too-late establishment resistance subjugates Trans people into a mascot, a projection of performance politics and guilt. “‘All that you’ve loved and worked for will be erased,” she recites at one point, in reference to not only the passage of time, but the creep of gentrification, the cultural backlash that inevitably hits back at any era of progress or liberation. Despite this heaviness, Alexander’s performance holds a kernel of hope, in that acknowledging this history creates precedent for the future.

The main message of the show isn’t surprising: Trans people have always existed. Gay and Queer people have always existed. And they won’t bend to the whims of a controlling zeitgeist. Within each person—and this is reflected in the work of each of these artists—is the portal to their inner present, as the inner landscapes, struggles, narratives, and nurturing, reflect the necessity of authentically living in their truth.

The performances, and videos in Paradise Portals, are illustrations of human struggle, which despite the many forms our storytelling takes as a species, is the thing our work always comes back to. The arts, and the humanities, are called the humanities because it is the study of us, humanity, a thing we all share—a thing that the powers that be want to obscure by coining such terms as “the Sin of Empathy.” This plurality of experience is deeply and subtly reflected in this very timely exhibition.

Paradise Portals is on view at Area 405 with performances on Friday nights through June 13th.