Image credit: Laneya Billingsley
VITAL HYBRIDS is a showcase of collaborative works by local Bay Area and LA based women and queer artists bridging visual arts, performance, and technology culminating as both a month-long exhibition opening November 17th at B4BEL4B Gallery and a night of performances on November 18th at Gray Area Theater. These works, developed over the past 6 months, tackle important national and global issues such as women’s and transgender rights and visibility, fighting actively against xenophobia, and safety around bodies that are seen as “other” by exploring post-digital and post-gender identity, safely online and offline, anti-harassment, sousveillance, and more.
Made possible through a generous grant from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation’s New & Experimental Works Program, Vital Hybrids is a very powerful coming together of women and non-binary artists from different backgrounds in movement, performance, programming, development, gaming, design, and more. Featured artists will include Atley Loughridge, Porpentine Heartscape, Lark V.C.R., Laneya Billingsley, HORs (the Hackers of Resistance), Mirabelle Jones, Anna Luisa Petrisko, Julia Litman-Cleper, Kim Ip, Pseuda, Jaq Dalziel, and more.
Curated and presented by B4BEL4B Gallery
Co-curated and produced by Frances Fleetwood
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Atley Loughridge
Atley is a game designer and programmer who wants to use VR to analyze the psychological systems we’re embedded in. Atley programs networking for Gentle Manhands. She founded Code Camp, an initiative to teach programming by building tactile metaphors with everyday objects like jewelry and pipe cleaners. She and partner Allison Comrie are making Palimpsest: a rhythm-action VR game about fighting for the femme psyche in a hostile technological environment.
Porpentine Heartscape
Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a writer, game designer, and dead swamp milf in Oakland. Her work includes xenofemme scifi/fantasy, cursed videogames, and globe-spanning sentient slime molds. She has exhibited at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, EMP Museum, and the National Gallery of Denmark, been commissioned by Vice and Rhizome, and is a fellow with Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, and Tiptree.
Lark V.C.R.
Lark VCR works in video, installation, critical design, and performance—VCR stands for Virtually Conflicted Reality. Their work explores multiplicity of meaning and experience in an increasingly digitized world, nudging at the dissolving boundary between body and machine. Lark is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley’s MFA program, and has shown at Frameline, MIX NYC, Echo Park Film Center, ATA, the San Francisco International Arts Festival, and Schuwels Museum in Berlin.
HORs – (the Hackers of Resistance)
HORs – an anonymous collaboration with fellow qwoc about a cyberfeminist hacktivist group that is working to use technology to embolden resistance movements in the face of fascism.
Mirabelle Jones
Mirabelle Jones is a multimedia performance artist, writer, advocate, and visual artist from Oakland, CA whose works combine digital and analog processes with a focus on generating dialogues about safety, the body in public / private space, gender violence, and narratives of social justice. She is the founder and Chief Executive Artist at Art Against Assault: a grassroots arts organization which seeks to create public dialogue about sexual assault and domestic violence through survivor-directed creative projects.
Jules Litman-Cleper
Jules Litman-Cleper is a Spatial Media Artist and an enthusiast of evolutionary biology who recently graduated in Design & Computation. They are a bay area native and have been practicing multi-media performance through the music project Waxy Tomb since 2011. They have taught classes on Video and Augmented-Reality & Dance and have exhibited at Krowswork, Aggregate Space and New York Studio School with performances at Various Empty Car Dealerships, The Lab, ATA and CCRMA.
http://vvirushdwwax.tumblr.com
Laneya Billingsley
Laneya Billingsley, a bay area native, is a video artist whose work comments on the inner and outer self/selves. Our desires. Our emptiness. our wholeness. Our awareness. Our slumber. A spiritual like navigation through the world(s) we live in.
https://vimeo.com/user46828764
Anna Luisa Petrisko
Anna Luisa Petrisko is a sound, video, performance and visual artist. From 2008 to 2017, she performed under the moniker JEEPNEYS, after the iconic converted WWII army jeeps of the Philippines, which later evolved into a platform for artistic collaboration between Filipino/American artists and Diasporic research. Anna Luisa’s art investigates the complexities of the colonized body while encompassing a multitude of experience of time, space, and self. Whether it is experimental opera or multimedia installation, her work is an otherworldly spectacle, exploring the space where future and ancient convene, invested as much in the sacred as in technological speculation. Petrisko’s trademark hand-painted bodysuits are re-indigenized alien skin, an embodied research project and contemporary expression of pre-colonial tattooing practices of Pacific Ocean Peoples. With synthesized sounds, intuitive movement, and inter-dimensional imagery, she creates fresh mythological landscapes.
http://www.jeepneysjeepneys.com
Micaela Tobin
Soprano and sound artist Micaela Tobin specializes in contemporary voice, having performed with the experimental opera company, The Industry, in their production of Hopscotch—a mobile opera for 24 cars (dir. Yuval Sharon). The recent premiere of her original electroacoustic opera, Unseal Unseam at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, CA was described as “paralyzingly beautiful” (Alicia Beyer, New Classic LA). Micaela writes and performs experimental music under the moniker, “White Boy Scream,” in which she dissects her operatic style of singing through the use of electronic effects pedals. Micaela has performed internationally as one of the key members of Dada Divas (comp. Jacqueline Bobak), a new opera based on the work of the female poets of the Dada movement. The group has performed at the XIII Festival Internacional Musica Nueva Monterrey 2016, in Monterrey, Mexico, and at the 2016 Dada World Fair in San Francisco. Micaela is currently on faculty as a Voice Instructor at the California Institute for the Arts.
Kim Ip
Kim Ip, “Krimm”, has been making work fresh out of her vintage 2014 Mills College swimming pool. Her body of work is determined by her desire to curate a process for her collaborators that allows for a deep study of their idiosyncrasies and how they mesh together to form a collective performance. Lately, her process is influenced by her daily experiences in public and private space, citing her desire to explore her womxn identity as a fearful and exhilarating experience.
Pseuda (Nicholas Navarro)
Nicholas Navarro is a multimedia performance artist who, in 2014, began performing in SOMA’s experimental drag scene under the moniker “Pseuda”. Taking queer nightlife aesthetics, pop music and drag performance structure as a jumping off point, they’ve crafted a distinctly unique and arresting style. Using makeup, costume, practical special effects and the integration of technology they create memorable, emotionally charged images that build to sublime and sometimes grotesque climaxes. Their work is grounded in empathy with the characters they embody, using these antiheroes as avatars to explore otherness and to create space for mutual catharsis with performer and audience.
Jaq H Dalziel
Jaq is a trans agender Oakland-based artist, dancer, and choreographer. Using their privilege of being a visible trans agender artist, Jaq is committed to providing artists of all ages accessible and intentional spaces for non-gendered classes and workshops. They have been a teaching artist for almost a decade and have received training from University of Alaska, Anchorage (BFA) and Mills College (MFA).
Kinetech Arts
Kinetech Arts is a group of artists and scientists creating unique performances that combine dance and science with the newest interactive technology. Founded by Artistic Directors Weidong Yang and Daiane Lopes da Silva in January 2013, Kinetech Arts has performed at ODC theatre, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, KUNST-STOFF arts, L.A.S.T festival, Moscone Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, De Young Museum, among others. They host DanceHack, an annual tech + dance event, in association with CounterPulse SF. Kinetech Arts was recognized by the SF WEEKLY as “Best Genre-Defying Sci-Artistic Collaboration of 2014”
Image credit: Atley Loughridge
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