Perhaps Chavez is comfortable with paradox because she is a bit of one herself. She is a performance artist who conceives and enacts much of her work in a dark, private setting. She is a still photographer who makes images that are full of motion. She is a thoroughly cosmopolitan contemporary who finds her deepest inspiration in the lives of Old Testament prophets and medieval mystics. (“They were the original performance artists,” she says, referring to prophets like Ezekiel, who is reported to have lain on his side for 390 days facing a miniature version of Jerusalem that he drew in the dirt.)

 

Chavez also knows that to most clearly see light one must first dwell in darkness—whether it be in literal physical darkness or simply in a posture of unknowing before the greater mysteries of existence. Accordingly, the artist has developed the spiritual discipline of meditating in darkness for hours in an effort to clear her mind in order to be visited by the creative Muse. “The dark has always been a very close companion in my creative process,” she explains, “because it has permitted me since I was a very young girl to explore in detail rich, immaterial visions that appear before my eyes.” Both are evidenced in a visit to the artist’s studio during one of her shoots—a privilege, I soon discover, that has never been accorded, so intimate and collaborative is her creative process.

The artist’s normally pristine white loft space is completely dark when I enter; all windows are covered with blackout curtains and Chavez is clad in black leggings, a black long-sleeved shirt and a black scarf that pulls back her hair. She introduces me to her model, a renowned young dancer who has worked anonymously with the artist for years—her body an element as essential, Chavez admits, to the work as the camera that captures it. The artist, herself a dancer, glories in giving credit to her model’s role in the creative process, putting her in the literal spotlight as she recedes into the background.

Although Chavez determines the direction of each shoot and comes into it with a vision, there is an improvisational fluidity to the relationship that provides its own inspirational spark. Chavez invites me to sit down at the kitchen table. Candles flicker, water simmers, voices murmur warm and low. This is clearly sacred space. And as with every sacred space, there is a ritual to be enacted. Chavez explains that before beginning a shoot, she and her model always share a bowl of green tea together in silence as a way of aligning themselves, of tuning out the static of the outside world. The artist pours hot water into a simple earthenware bowl and whisks the matcha inside to a green froth. They pass the bowl to each other, then to me. We sip and gaze intently at each other and I am amazed at how vulnerable I feel, how intimate the action is—this staring into a stranger’s eyes without recourse to words. Soon the discomfort gives way to a sense that some circuit has been completed, some communion enacted. After 15 minutes we move from the kitchen to Chavez’s work area in silence.

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Through the room’s gloaming I can sense that Chavez’s camera is on a tripod facing an oversized black seamless backdrop. She has arranged a chair for me that is off to the side and I sit back as unobtrusively as I can and watch as artist and model begin to align themselves by mirroring each other’s movements, eyes closed. Chavez likens this preliminary stage of creation to waiting for the Aurora Borealis to appear, a kind of physical vision casting that becomes increasingly articulated and isolated to a specific bodily gesture that will become the focus of the shoot. “It requires meditative concentration, mutual surrender and tenacious connection,” says Chavez of the process, which seems so intimate that at first sitting in the dark watching feels transgressive, as if I were a peepshow client getting a private thrill. But this feeling soon becomes a sense that I am party to something far more intimate: worship, perhaps. 

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Today Chavez is interested in a diamond-like shape formed by the legs in a demi-plié. Setting her camera’s shutter open, Chavez has her model demi-plié across the floor in one direction while she herself moves quickly from side to side, triggering a handheld flash that bounces off legs in a distinct pattern. It is grueling physical work and the model needs to stop occasionally to shake out sore muscles. Chavez, for her part, seems entirely energized by the process, her alabaster face breaking open in excitement, illuminated in the darkness by the glow of the resulting image playing on her camera’s viewfinder.

After an hour, it’s time for me to leave but Chavez and her model will continue to work until late to capture more iterations of the diamond shape. The bright glare and hurly-burly that greet me on the street break the spell of the past few hours. 

Everything seems like sacrilege as I make my way down to the subway.

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A few days after my visit, I re-examine the series of 25 photographs that comprise A Thousand Rainbows and am surprised by how fleshly they seem. Somehow in the spiritually meditative space of Chavez’s loft I forgot how phantasmagorically sexual some of them are, whether depicting the cascade of breasts in Cloud Peaks Impossible to Ascend, the pubic pillars that populate Cloud Beards Impossible to Stroke or the crooked, spread legs of Famished Crustacean on Future’s Shore.

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Of course there is something disquieting—threatening, even—about the transformation of the female body into something fiercely sexual but not quite human: into a mountain range, an architectural detail, a crab scuttling along the beach. Even more fearsome is the female form shape-shifted into what looks to be Kali, the multi-armed Hindu goddess of creation and destruction, in Grasping Spirit with Spirit, or an all-devouring Venus Trap whose arachnoid legs are open wide, beckoning whatever hapless male comes her way. In her most arresting image, though, Chavez transforms her model’s emphatically female torso and buttocks into a double-headed phallus—a nod, perhaps, to the great influence that Louise Bourgeois has had on her work, or just another reminder that even gender can be seen as a fluctuating spectrum rather than two opposite poles.

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An alternate reading comes to mind, though, when I am reminded of the artist’s allegiance to the mystics of the Middle Ages—to figures like St. Theresa of Avila, whose ultimate visionary experience was of being stabbed through the heart repeatedly by a spear wielded by a beautiful male angel. “The pain was so sharp,” the mystic wrote, “that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by the intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one's soul be content with anything less than God.” Sexual and spiritual ravishment exist in parallel planes that interconnect in mysterious ways—one of which, Chavez suggests, is art.

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While Chavez’s vision in A Thousand Rainbows centers on the figurative female nude and necessarily evokes a host of art historical associations—from the defiant eroticism of Titian’s Venus of Urbino to the dynamism of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase—there is also a way that some of her photographs serve as pure geometry. Unlike her more emphatically libidinal images, Chavez’s spiraling Andromeda, twisting Helix Nude and doubled Causal Loop express a more abstracted approach to the body. It is as if she were sending up the much-hallowed twentieth-century idea that only non-figurative art is an adequate vehicle for spiritual expression by creating sacred geometries with the very flesh modernism so often feared. “In motion,” Chavez points out, “the body becomes a vehicle for exploring infinite semiotic inventiveness and archetypal geometries that can be found throughout the wider cosmos. All language requires movement and is founded in the body’s birth, its breaking and its restoration. I approach the nude not as an object of spectatorship, but as a chart for linguistic discovery, a sort of map of the heavens. The body is a microcosm of the great cosmos and dance is a doorway into inner and outer space.” 

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Six months later I am speaking to Chavez about whether she has seen any works of art lately that have been inspiring. Without hesitation she tells me about the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, where she recently spent a month investigating the life and work of Saint Francis, who she calls “one of the greatest performance artists in history.” She speaks of a Cimabue fresco of the crucifixion that is so oxidized it looks like a photographic negative. Also visually inspiring: the way in which the upper basilica’s water damaged ceiling frescoes have resulted in a blue-green efflorescence which Chavez likens to the Aurora Borealis. I point out that in both instances what she finds beautiful is actually the product of deterioration— the death of perfection, as it were.

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At this, she gets excited. “Exactly,” she says, “that’s it exactly,” and segues into a discussion of cross-cultural narratives of the body after death, including differences between the Christian concept of embodiment and the Eastern concept of transcendence—a topic of passionate interest to her of late. 
Embodiment allows for the seeming impossibility of an infinite spirit housed in a finite form, while transcendence sees the removal of spirit from the body as preferable. Embodiment honors the body, including time’s effect on it. Thus the beauty of an oxidized fresco and a water-stained ceiling. Or a dying star.

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For if A Thousand Rainbows begins its visual cycle with creation, it makes sense that it end in death. In the case of Chavez’s Last Confessions of a Dying Star, though, death is not gentle, as if heeding Dylan Thomas’s poem to “burn and rave at the close of day,” to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The lotus form of Firmament’s Blossom has become a fierce and frenetic blur, the performance of which, Chavez confesses, exhausted her model to the point of vomiting. 

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Rather than deny the inevitability of physical death, the artist leans into it. For embedded even in the fleshly perfection of the artist’s visions is the seed of the body’s ephemerality—its eventual weakness, brokenness and corruptibility. For Chavez and those performative mystics who preceded her, death is not the end, rather another beginning. The very name of Chavez’s series comes from the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the rainbow body, in which a master who attains perfect knowledge does not die, rather transforms into a body of pure white light. 

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Similarly, Biblical depictions of the resurrection body show it transfigured and radiant. Transcendence; embodiment; transformation; resurrection: the language that comes up when discussing Chavez’s art indicates that it has as much to do with contemplation and worship as it does with the preoccupations of contemporary performative practice. Like the medieval polymath Hildegard von Bingen before her, Chavez has dedicated herself to nothing less than praying the body. For “the body is the garment of the soul,” as von Bingen wrote, “and it is the soul which gives life to the voice. That's why the body must raise its voice in harmony with the soul for the praise of God.”