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You’ll Have to See It to Believe It, Eliza Devilee in ARTPOCALYPSE NOW, Aasleagh
2026
By Katilin Pignataro
Where does an angel sleep? If you’re seeing what I’m seeing, I think we both know. In a bed of acrylic, fabric, glue, transparent PVC sheeting, duh.
When I say angel, I don’t quite mean Venus, she who stands pensive in her shell, angels blowing wind a gale, but something a bit more … contemporary?
Eliza Devilee’s Shirt (2026) is something of a modern day Venus. One, recognisable. Two, enduring.
Shirt is the shirt that your mum wore in the ’80s, the one she’s wearing in that photo of her magnetised to the fridge. The same one that, right now, you’re wearing to work, hungover and slumped, slinking slowly into your spinny chair behind the big desktop iMac.
Shirt is the shirt that your friend gave you, that she was passed down from her older sister who works at an upmarket retail store in Daylesford, that you’re wearing right now while you sit on the couch of some guy who’s kind of a friend of a friend. You don’t really know him, but you don’t want to leave because you’re trying to see where this is going. It’s July. Why be tight about turning up the heating?
Shirt is the shirt that you wear to the pub when you try to push a door that says pull with two full hands and spill half a pint back onto yourself, but then you laugh and it’s okay because Shirt is a shirt that you can throw in the wash, as long as it’s not hot.
Sometimes Shirt is that raw linen that you wear when you’re already burnt at Sandringham Beach, its accidental roughness stinging against the skin. Shirt didn’t mean to.
Other times, Shirt is the silky, slippery kind that you let glide against people’s backs in the darkness of a club, eye aglow, music blasting. “Let’s kiss”, says Shirt.
It is tempting to think of Devilee's decision to preserve the object that is Shirt as an attempt to stop it changing, but the opposite might be true. Shirt is always mutating. It takes on the milieus it has brushed shoulders with (both figuratively and literally), all while remaining immediately legible as a garment.
Shirt is no longer something we put on and forget about, but something now suspended in transparent PVC forever, and in this sense, Shirt feels less like a preservation of an object than a preservation of its capacity to mutate.