b'In two recent exhibitions, Marble, Mirrors, Pictures and Darkness (2016) and Time and the Other (2018)in part realized in collaboration with artist Mike Braythe jewelry seems in search of a way back home, back into the state of images, representation, and fantasy from where it came. Whereas previous installations were sparse and direct, with jewelry elegantly hung on walls, now there are a multitude of mediating elements, including Plexiglas cases, smoked glass partitions, and digitally edited multichannel video. These formal developments come together in two photographic works, Time and the Other and Smoke (both 2018), which feature layered arrangements of reflective, metallic, and printed surfaces that disorient and unmoor the viewer, heightening instead of highlighting the fantasy and artifice.Given our current political preoccupations, these new directions in Kivarkiss work could suggest a thickening of conspiratorial plots, multidirectional movements for resistance, or a desperate but aimless urgency. But another reading surfaces if we consider the self-portrait included in Time and the Other, which finds the artist covering half her face with a photo-graph of a heavily bejeweled movie star. She could be hiding, or she be could be aligning herself with artifice and deceit as positive, or at least useful, aesthetic and political strategies. With her signature jewelry, Kivarkis leads us to recognize the limits of actualizing our dreams by making fantasy reality. When she then reverses the process, moving deeper into and dwell-ing in a realm of glamour, she poses a tangled question: Given how terrible reality is, what, after all, is so bad about a dream deferred, or the lie that gets the job done?Anya KivarkisTime and the Other, 2018Following pages:Smoke, 201846'