Approaching the portals
of Red Rae.

~±_: Red senses the threshold. :_±~ photo: Jessye Grieve-Carlson

This writing emerges in celebration of the exhibition Paradise Portals at Area 405 in Baltimore, Maryland.

The show runs until June 13 and features numerous performances and events. Details can be found at the bottom of this writing.

PORTAL ONE

initiation

photo: Jessye Grieve-Carlson

R ed is someone I have know for less than a year and yet I find myself texting them things like luv u genius as though we were longtime family. I want to write to you about Paradise Portals, their beautiful, mysterious exhibition now up at Area 405. But it feels important to do so from the portal into their practice that I have, which is a personal and relational one. Among the learnings I've gleaned from witnessing their expansive, playful practice is that the primary portal, for all of us, is the realm of relationship.

~±_: Nance & Red, Summer Solstice 2024. :_±~ photo: Adam Grossi

It is June 2024, and the Summer Solstice is approaching. I am in the driftless region of Wisconsin, at a very special parcel of land known as Pachamanka, just beginning to get settled amongst the plants, animals, and temporary family of other artists in retreat with me. Red arrives a day after the rest of us, baked in sun and vision. Nance Klehm, artist/ecologist, is the portal summoner here. Red will metabolize this experience as Prairie Portal, among the mesmerizing works now illuminating Area 405’s expansive warehouse gallery.

~±_: Prairie Portal (still), 2025, featuring Nance Klehm :_±~ by Red Rae

PORTAL TWO

opening to threshold

Red writes that Paradise Portals

uses movement, drone footage, livestream video, and green screen technology to create portals between 6 performers’ bodies and environments that hold significance for them.
This project explores both the visibility and removal of people, histories, and bodies from the spaces we occupy. By bravely choosing to open portals we both expose and erase the body and superimpose both history and fantasy into the spaces in “between.”

This exhibition, brimming with magic and mystery, was initiated by a deceptively simple question Red asked of seven collaborators:

If your body
is a portal,
where does
it lead?

🕳️

~±_: Soleil (video still) :_±~

In the cavernous industrial space of Area 405 we see the way this question unfolds for renowned queer visual artists, musicians, drag queens, and scholars Eli Erlick, Aave, Rahne Alexander, Soleil, Bao Nguyen, Alex D’Agostine, Amy Reid, Pangelica, Bryce Hample, Arit Emmanuela and Max Gregg. The majority of artworks are video projections, many involving the bodies of the artists.

Red’s initial vision for Paradise Portals was

a multimedia performance and installation that uses movement, livestream video, and green screen technology to create portals between performers bodies and environments that hold significance for them

to explore

both the visibility and removal of people, history, and the body from the spaces we occupy.

In between the words we find a gentle definition of paradise: the place where our bodies and the places we love become inseparable.

~±_: Red, belonging. Pachamanka, June 2024. :_±~ photo: Adam Grossi

PORTAL THREE

pleasure practice

~±_: Red, blooming. :_±~ photo: Jessye Grieve-Carlson

R ed’s been pursuing portals for some time now. When we met last summer, they’d just come from another rural artist’s retreat, where they’d built one. I had no idea what that meant until Red showed me the video: a large, red, translucent disc, slowly spinning on a stand. It looked like a signal or a beacon, perhaps broadcasting something. Perhaps drawing something closer. Perhaps both.

Among Red’s many mysteries is their devotion to this singular, archetypal color. When did they begin their relationship with red? What experience with this hue motivated their name? Part of me wonders why I have not asked them this obvious question. Another part of me knows that it is not the responsibility of intimacy to render the opaque transparent.

Video is a natural medium for portalcraft. The moving image has, from its inception, ferried us elsewhere. In 1895 the Lumiere Brothers showed cinema’s first audience a moving train; the crowd ducked in order to avoid collision.

In 2025, the cinema is exploded, fractal, omnipresent. The video portals are in our hands, incessant and algorithmically catered to captivate us.

The portals offered us at Area 405, however, are of a different nature. Among the pleasures here is the pleasure of agency. The video performances are not jumping at us, craven for our attention. Many of the bodies are engaged in what appears to be deeply personal ritual. The portal of the screen becomes a metaportal, as the landscapes and bodies open up to more landscapes, the landscapes to more bodies.

~±_: Installation view, Paradise Portals, 2025. :_±~ photo: Jessye Grieve-Carlson

In front of these illuminated presences I get the sense that I am witnessing something reverent, private, erotic. The movements and symbolic actions feel intentionally hermetic. I will not be run over by the moving train, but nor am I on it. I am there to bear witness to the movement, and to see what it stirs within me.

PORTAL FOUR

flexible futures

~±_: Alexander D’Agostino performs in Pleasure Portals. :_±~ photo: Jessye Grieve-Carlson

R ed’s work, in their own words, encourages the radical act of laughter in the face of darkness by translating everyday realities into performance and play. Radical indeed. How dare we laugh? Does not the darkness demand our sober reflex?

Ha.

I am reminded of our time together in the driftless.

~±_: Red in Pleasure Portals. :_±~ photo: Jessye Grieve-Carlson

Red and I catch wind of a nearby swimming hole. We hop in their car and go check it out. An hour later we are waist deep in freshwater, standing at the cusp of a large bed of lily pads. I’m hesitant to cross their threshold, imagining the long spindles of roots and the mysterious creatures inhabiting them.

Red, unbothered by this fear, is determined to discover what the floating discs look like from below. I watch them experiment, trying to figure out how to stay low enough in the water, how to wiggle to penetrate the dense roots, how to avoid inhaling water up their nose. There is a lot of failure, and a lot of laughter.

The only other beachgoers are within earshot. They are trying to determine Red’s gender, speaking about them as though they aren’t part of their world, but an object of fascination. I imagine that some variant of this callous curiosity is a regular ambient presence in Red’s movement through the world. Red is unbothered. Why despair in the face of darkness when you can try to peep the lily pads from below?

While most of us are anxiously casting our predictions for the near term — when will the carnage end? and when it does, can we restore what we’ve lost? — Red’s vision extends far beyond the catastrophe of the present and into a trans futurity.

“The future,” writes José Esteban Muñoz, “is queerness’s domain.” Queerness encompasses many qualities, but perhaps its unifying substrate is indeterminacy: locations are dynamic, grounds shifting, longings molten.

The fear — and then, the aggression — with which people respond to queer selfhood is a function of our shared terror of self revelation. The truth is that we are all playing, all performing our everyday realities. But the profoundly playful nature of our reality is, for many, too heretical to acknowledge. So we choose disconnection and repression, and we drain the pleasure from our lives. Trans futurity disavows these needless sacrifices. Transformation is not an option; we have to enter the portals of self intimacy while we still can. The only ignition for this path is courage. And the only sustenance is pleasure.

~±_: Red portal. :_±~ photo: Jessye Grieve-Carlson

Paradise Portals runs through June 13, 2025. Here are the remaining performances and events as of the time of publication:

———

Friday, May 30:
Performance with Red Rae, Soleil, Bao Nguyen; Live Dj set by ILUSM
Door at 7:00 p.m., Performance at 8:00 p.m.
Cost: Sliding Scale $10-$50

———

Sunday, June 8:
Artist Talk – Red Rae and Eli Erlick
6:00 p.m.
Free (Donation Accepted)

———

Friday, Jun 13:
Closing Performance – Red Rae, Live set by GRL PWR
Door at 5:00 p.m., Performance at 7:00 p.m.
Free (Donation Accepted)

THE REALMS OF RED

Approaching the portalsof Red Rae.