Le Petit Versailles Garden
346 E Houston Street
New York, NY 10009
Friday, July 28th, 2017
https://www.facebook.com/events/246869005815064/
Arantxa Araujo is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist and neuroscientist based in NYC. Araujo is interested in how art changes the brain by allowing curated sensorimotor stimuli to create awareness. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Mexico and USA. Some spaces that have featured her work include Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, JACK, Panoply Lab, Garis & Hahn Gallery, SITI Lab, Live Love Festival, Movement Research, Radiator Gallery, Triskelion Arts, Idio Gallery, Walls-Ortiz Gallery, and The CAVE (NYC); SPACE gallery and Bunker Projects (Pittsburgh) and MATCH (Houston). Araujo was awarded a full scholarship from Mexican Government Institution CONACYT and holds an MA in Motor Learning and Control from Teachers College, Columbia University. She was a fellow at The Performance at the Center, SKIP! and a resident at Teatro de los Sentidos. She has been invited to be artist-in-residence at Bunker Projects 2016-2017 and Art in Odd Places NYC (2017).
Ayana Evans is a NYC based artist. She frequently visits her hometown of Chicago whose Midwestern and sometimes controversial reputation is a major influence on her art. In 2015 she received the Jerome Foundation's Theater and Travel & Study Grant for artistic research abroad. Summer 2016 Evans completed her installment of the residency, "Back in Five Minutes" curated by Nicolas Dumit Estevez, at El Museo Del Barrio in NYC. Evans’s on-going performances/public interventions include: "Operation Catsuit" and "I Just Came Here to Find a Husband."
Instagram: @ayana.m.evans
IV Castellanos is an abstract performance artist and sculptor. They have performed at the Queens Museum, Gruentaler9 (Berlin), DFBRL8R (Chicago), Grace Exhibiton Space, IV Soldiers, Dixon Place, PPL, Gallery Sensei and Rosekill (Kingston, NY). They founded the F.A.G. (Feminist Art Group), 2016 with co-founder Esther Neff, which has alternating performers.
Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) is a space, performative thinktank, and flexible collective making performance art, operas of operations, and discursive situations. Founded in 2006 by Esther Neff and currently co-directed with Brian McCorkle, PPL have performed relational tours, a diner, a natural history museum, a silviculture museum, artificial enculturation processes, conferences, and evolving installations. Operas such as NATURE FETISH and the trilogy The Transformational Grammar of the Institutional Glorybowl have been performed in NYC at Momenta Art, Dixon Place, The Brick, Grace Exhibition Space, LPAC, the cell, 14 Wall Street through LMCC Swing Space, multiple chashama sites, ISSUE Project Room, Silent Barn, and elsewhere all over the USA and the world.
Pictured: Jack Waters, audience participant
Friday, August 25th, 2017
https://www.facebook.com/events/432857763781273/
Coco Café is a first-generation Chicanx interdisciplinary performance artist, cultural worker, curator, and organizer from the suburban “Bible Belt” of Dallas, Texas. As a person living within the diaspora, she practices performance as a decolonizing methodology, exploring indigeneity, queer identities, trauma, history, and memory through autobiography. Their practice is fueled by research in the U.S. and Mexico which traces the mass disappearances and forced displacement of people in her father’s home state of Guerrero
Kledia Spiro (1987, Tirana, Albania) creates videos, performances, installations, and paintings. Kledia was born in Albania and was part of an olympic weightlifting team. She uses weightlifting as a symbol of survival, empowerment and celebration. Weightlifting becomes a vehicle for discussing women’s role in society, immigration and times of war.
Spiro explores the connection between weightlifting, folk dance and daily life as a new celebratory ritual for understanding the relationship between the artist and her parents, as well as the present and the past. By experimenting with indeterminate methods, Spiro wants the viewer to access the otherwise inaccessible spaces. Her works are based on Freudian and Piagetian behavioral concepts: visions that reflect psycho-analysis, behavioral psychology, and a sensation of indisputability, combined with details of odd, eccentric, absurd, totemic and humoristic elements. By questioning where one is and the concept of movement, Spiro investigate the manipulation of lifting objects overhead and it's effects.
Lorene Bouboushian is a performance artist who utilizes "self-exposure and vulnerability in real, risky ways" [CultureBot, 2011] and produces “thought-provoking commentary on social limits” [Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2016]. She has spread her black magic from Seattle to Madison, Athens, Beirut, and Zagreb. Projects include punk-noise duo ::missdick vibrocis (with Forced into Femininity), Know What Smokes—a durational duet with closed eyes and objects (with Kaia Gilje), and extent of explosive lament, a solo on class and liminal Lebaneseness. She has traveled to sites including University of Kentucky, Lexington, and Universidad de Las Americas Puebla to teach interdisciplinary, accessible performance workshops.
Shawn Escarciga (Brooklyn, NY, USA) is an experimental movement artist whose work is based in Butoh and the creation of new movement paradigms, particularly around the queer body. His work has been shown throughout New York City (Panoply Performance Lab, Glasshouse ArtLifeLab[Performeando], Queens Museum[LiveArt.us], MIX NYC, Triskelion, Chinatown Soup{Performance Anxiety], The Clemente), in other cities (Boston, Chicago, Lexington), and also in another country once (Month of Performance Art - Berlin). He has collaborated and performed with artists and collectives throughout New York City, including Butoh company, The Vangeline Theater/New York Butoh Institute, and the multidisciplinary social justice and performance group, Gender/Power, as well as teaching movement and Butoh workshops independently for Otion Front Studio and the University of Kenutcky. He thinks a lot about classism, queer visibility, subtlety, how to light patriarchal structures on fire effectively, and what it would be like to live in a country that supports non-commercial artists, which might look something like eating a 2000 calorie diet regularly and owning a Shiba Inu.
Friday, September 22nd, 2017
https://www.facebook.com/events/870341316449454/
Jenna Kline’s most important tool is her body. Nightmares, memories and heartbreak fuel her work. Her body is a sculpture, storyteller, and most importantly, an instrument to connect with her audience. The performances are an outlet to create an expression of raw emotion.
The goal is to achieve emotional enlightenment. Once she reaches this state, she is her most genuine, transparent and true self. Wearing her heart on her sleeve for all to see. Exhausted and sweating and she has transcended her body and has become a sweaty, fleshy creature.
The air is left with lingering aroma of copper, fried foods and hand sanitizer.
Quinn Dukes is a multimedia performance artist, activist and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work addresses human connection, social injustice and ritual. In 2014, following a heated discussion about the death of performance art, Dukes founded Performance Is Alive. She is a tireless advocate for performance art and higher education via appointments at Grace Exhibition Space and the School of Visual Arts.
Sophia Mak is here and creates, makes and performs. They have made their home in Baltimore City for the past 7 years but have recently moved back to New York to apply knife and chopstick to perceptions and assumptions. Sophia investigates issues of race, gender, class, sexuality and intergenerational trauma through performance and invokes the stories of their ancestors to present new narratives. Their eyes are open and they are taking in the changing landscape of city neighborhoods, learning about the role that art plays in it all, and trying to listen real hard to the growing pains, unacknowledged histories, and the rumbling, crumbling walls that have heard stories of multiple life times.
Ama BE is a multi-disciplinary artist living in Brooklyn, NY. As a Ghanaian born in America, Ama's own work investigates notions of value acquired through cultural inheritance, foreign imposition and personal inquiry. Her current series, “Promotion” is an evolving performance/visual installation that explores the confrontation of opposing cultural value systems when they meet at the dinner table. She is interested in extending the work to include branches of the African Diaspora, currently producing the next set of pieces set in Cuba. She has been a part of several performance casts including Tsedaye Makonnen’s Common Grounds series, as well as Effie Nkrumah’s, See What I See tableau vivant at NYU’s Kimmel Galleries, and performed solo in las almas errantes by Social & Cultural Lab. She is recently back from performing The African Body Snatchers in the Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Ghana.
Ama is also the Producer of an upcoming feature length documentary, Look the Other Way (www.facebook.com/AfricaCreativeIndustry/ ), addressing the state of Africa’s creative industries.