QUEER DIASPORAS: Lavender City of Dreams
Presents:
X-aMEN-ing Masculinities

A project of LA FREEWAVES in conjunction with Lavender Dreams / Queer Biennial and Coaxial Arts Foundation presents a video program and panel featuring works by femme and non-binary artists exploring masculinity, launching X-aMEN-ing Masculinities, a project of FREEWAVES. Curated by Anuradha Vikram

Friday, June 3rd
7:00 and 9:00 pm repeat VIDEO screenings
8pm Panel Discussion
Reception to follow final screening
FREE
In-person at Coaxial Arts, DTLA.
Mask wearing is highly recommended. N/95, K/95 or Surgical Masks preferred.

X-aMEN-ing Masculinities - Freewaves extends its multi-year engagement with themes of gender acceptance, diversity, and transition into the often-criticized but under-examined sphere of masculinity. Working with a racially, generationally, and gender diverse group of artists, X-aMEN-ing Masculinities will bring together works that consider and compare paradigms of masculinity including male bonding rituals, trans masculinity, masculine paradigms of care, and the uses of power. Artists whose lives and work challenge expectations of masculinity, such as those assigned male at birth who identify as nonbinary or femme, will also be invited to participate. Together, we will stage an interactive space where emotionally positive and socially constructive elements that we identify as “masculine” can be reclaimed from the “toxic” paradigm that both dominates and flattens public discourse. Masculinity, which is often though not exclusively represented by men, is the lingua franca of power in a patriarchal social structure. Artists, especially those who use performance, are adept at making power relations both apparent and absurd, a tactic that we anticipate many of those invited to participate here will employ.

Similarly to FREEWAVES 2018’s “Ain’t I A Womxn?” and 2019’s "Love &/Or Fear", X-aMEN-ing Masculinities will feature performance art, video and spoken word. This project will be an unforgettable gathering of the coteries, in which gender and race are de-segmentized, structured around a half mile circular promenade of stationary and roving, durational and scheduled performance art, spoken word, sonic art, media and zines, supplemented by socially inspired art, such as responses from our organizational partners. X-aMEN-ing Masculinities is curated By Anne Bray, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario and Anuradha Vikram.

Participating Artists:

Ohan Breiding
Ohan (formerly Johanna) Breiding works with photography, video, installation and collaboration to reinterpret historical events, putting the past into a meaningful transformative relation with the present, and giving voice and ground to underrepresented and marginalized communities. Their practice is committed to representing subjects that are marked “deviant” or illegible, and to experiment with forms of world-making that offer an alternative to state-sanctioned legitimation, and gendered and racialized hierarchies. It invites viewers to feel how resistance might move our bodies and to pay attention to the landscapes that hold us as we persist. In Epitaph for Family (2015), which opened two days after the U.S. legalization of same-sex marriage, Breiding documented queer-identified perspectives on family and kinship. A key stake was to disclose how heteronormative family structures define the individual and society-at-large. The project includes a series of photographic queer still lifes that reconsider the dinner table as a metaphor for the horizon, a futurity not yet reached, by replacing familiar objects with their queered others. The video and photographic installation, The Rebel Body (2017-present) explores ongoing strategies of political persecution through the story of Anna Göldi in Glarus, Switzerland, a woman who was victim to the16th century witch-hunts. This ongoing project is a collaboration with curator and writer Shoghig Halajian, Marxist-Feminist writer and theorist Silvia Federici (Caliban and the Witch) and Glarus locals who retell Anna Göldi’s story in order to activate the resilience of remembering and the landscape as a site of memory-keeping. The video installation, Demonstrative Score (2018), also explores ‘landscape-memory’ and consists of an archival compilation of acts of protest that aim to dismantle public monuments of European historical leaders and Confederate soldiers, in collaboration with choreographer taisha paggett. The work responds to recent iconoclastic events that demand revisions to national narratives, and define history as a living document that warrants active engagement by marginalized and violated subjects.
https://www.ohanbreiding.com

Patty Chang
Patty Chang is a Los Angeles based artist and educator who uses performance, video, installation and narrative forms when considering identity, gender, transnationalism, colonial legacies, the environment, large-scale infrastructural projects and impacted subjectivities. Her museum exhibition and book The Wandering Lake investigates the landscapes impacted by large scale human-engineered water projects such as the Soviet mission to irrigate the waters from the Aral Sea, as well as the longest aqueduct in the world, the North to South Water Diversion Project in China. Her most recent multichannel video project Milk Debt combines the act of lactation with people’s unspoken fears. Her work has been exhibited nationwide and internationally at such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum, New York; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; BAK, Basis voor actuele Kunst, Utrecht; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, England; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Times Museum in Guangzhou, China; and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She has received a United States Artist Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, a Creative Capital Fellowship, a Guna S. Mundheim Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant. She teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.
http://www.pattychang.com

Neha Choksi
Neha Choksi embraces a confluence of disciplines, including performance, video, installation, and sculpture. She disrupts logic by setting up poetic and absurd interventions in everyday life—from stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions. Her process often involves collaborative and lived performances that negotiate relationships in unconventional settings. The work allows in strands of her intellectual, cultural and social contexts to revisit the entanglements of time, consciousness, and socialization. Her most recent work-in-progress, Elementary, is a long-term, multi-format project that stems from a lived performance wherein she attends for an entire academic year (2018-2019) a Los Angeles public elementary school as a kindergarten student.
https://www.nehachoksi.com

Abigail Collins
Abigail Raphael Collins (b. New York) is an interdisciplinary artist using experimental documentary and video installation to consider relationships between intergenerational transmission and sound through a queer feminist lens. Recent exhibitions have been at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Pasadena Armory, Marathon Screenings, Angels Gate Cultural Center, PØST, Torrance Art Museum, and Seoha Gallery. She received a BFA from Cooper Union, an MFA from UCLA, and is the recipient of an FCA grant, Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, and UCIRA grant. Collins is a former resident at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon and Shandanken Projects. She was selected as the 2020 emerging curator at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.
http://abigailraphaelcollins.com

TJ Dedeaux-Norris
TJ Dedeaux-Norris fka Tameka Jenean Norris was born in Guam and received her undergraduate degree at the University of California, Los Angeles before graduating with an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2012. Norris has recently participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals including at Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Yerba Buena Museum, San Francisco, CA; Prospect.3 Biennial, New Orleans, LA; The Walker Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; and The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY, Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam,Netherlands, Sundance Film Festival, New York, NY, Mission Creek Festival, Iowa City, IA among many others. Norris has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Fountainhead Residency, Grant Wood Colony Fellowship, and The MacDowell Colony. She is the 2017 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Iowa.
http://www.mekajean.com

Amitis Motevalli
My experience as a working-class transnational migrant is the foundation of my drive to create art that contests popular beliefs about immigrants and diaspora. The core of my practice continues to be in examining the creation of symbols or icons, what gives power to them, how this process is enacted on a human level, the means by which it can be utilized to shift power to create social awareness, and, ideally, bring agency back into the hands of individuals who have been subjugated by oppressive social processes. Symbols and signifiers exist in dialogue with one another based on collective understandings that might shift within local context or can be understood globally based on human experience. More than anything, I aim through my work to exploit these signifiers as relayed through these iconic symbols and how they are imbued with meaning, whether they are extracted from religion, mass media, or other forms which can be fetishized or detached from their original significance. These are manipulated, isolated, and contextually adjusted to address or change the surrounding historical circumstances. Through my art I push the boundaries of Islamic definition as well as external projections.
http://amitismotevalli.com

Ryat Yezbick
Ryat Yezbick is a visual artist who uses their training in cultural anthropology to inform the issues they tackle as a maker. They are interested in the personal, social and political costs of conformity, and explore these costs with the participants in their films and performances. Figuring their experience centrally in their work, Yezbick uses encounters with collaborators and participants to investigate the impacts of digital surveillance technology on the collective American psyche. Their work addresses a complex set of questions around security, home, family, love, violence, power, and responsibility. They work in a variety of mediums – notably live performance, experimental documentary, and installation – that have garnered support from audiences and curators internationally. They are a published author and recent co-recipient of an Australia Council for the Arts Grant. Most recently, they were commissioned to create new performance works for the Bangkok Biennial, MAHA Pavillion. They have moderated panels with esteemed pioneers in art and technology, such as Scott Snibbe and Suzanne Anker, and taught at numerous colleges and universities. Yezbick’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Melbourne, and Glasgow, and in notable group exhibitions and performances at the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Los Angeles), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Materials & Applications (Los Angeles), The Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (Indianapolis), Glasgow International 2018 (Glasgow), The Banff Center for the Arts and Creativity (Banff), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), Space One (Seoul) and the Bangkok Biennial, MAHA Pavillion.
https://ryatyezbick.com

Curator:
Anuradha Vikram
Anuradha Vikram is a Los Angeles-based writer, curator, and educator who has guest-curated exhibitions for the Craft Contemporary (formerly CAFAM), Shulamit Nazarian, Mills College Art Museum, Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, ProArts, and the DeYoung Museum Artist Studio, and held curatorial positions at 18th Street Arts Center, UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice, Headlands Center for the Arts, Aicon Gallery, Richmond Art Center, and in the studio of artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Vikram is the author of "Decolonizing Culture," a collection of seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces (Art Practical/Sming Sming Books, 2017). She is faculty in the UCLA Department of Art, USC Roski School of Art and Design, and Cal Arts, and serves as an Editorial Board member for X-TRA and an editor for X Topics, a subsidiary of X Artists’ Books.

Rubén Esparza Projects and QUEER BIENNIAL 2022 are excited to present “QUEER DIASPORAS: Lavender City of Dreams,” a hybrid virtual and live exhibition accounting for a broader range of voices and equitable representation of the much overlooked in the canon of art exhibitions where practice supersedes theory, where identity, experimentation, and the unapologetically personal are on full display, where sharing of anecdotes, genealogies, and intersectional revelations are the focus. Including live outdoor performances at the ONE Gallery patio, 626 N Robertson Avenue, West Hollywood, California.

Touching on issues of identity, activism, futurity, and beauty where queerness is the thread that weaves through all these personal -- yet universal perspectives. Realized in imagined (no limits) digital galleries, spaces, and textures as the backdrop, along with up-to-the-minute live performances presented by this diverse group of LGBTQ+ artists.

Coaxial Arts Foundation is a 501(c)3 non-profit multi-disciplinary media arts organization devoted to the support of media, sound and performance art. Coaxial provides residencies, studio space, technical support and public exhibition space for live events to showcase underground artists whose works are often not exhibited in galleries as ephemeral art is not conducive to the gallery sales system. Coaxial activates a community of experimental media, sound and performance artists through commissions, events, workshops, live TV tapings, and exhibitions through the foundation’s downtown Los Angeles studio space.