Friday, 10.20.2023
8:00pm • $15

Ron Athey
Ron Athey has been working at the vanguard of performance art for 25 years. Self-taught, his work developed out of post-punk/pre-goth scenes and begins with Premature Ejaculation (PE), an early 1980s collaboration with Rozz Williams. Their approach to performance art was informed by the club actions of Johanna Went and the formulation of Industrial Culture, the idea of psycho/neuro acoustics in sound performance. In the 1990s, Athey formed a company of performers and made Torture Trilogy, a series of works that addressed the AIDS pandemic directly through memorializing and philosophical reflection.

This work is characterized by the physical intensity of 1970s body-art canon, such as COUM Transmission, Carolee Schneeman and the Viennese Actionists, which toured internationally. The trilogy’s final chapter, Deliverance, was commissioned and premiered at the ICA London. In the 2000s, Athey developed genre-stretching theatrical works like Joyce and The Judas Cradle, and a series of major solo performances such as The Solar Anus, Sebastiane, Self-Obliteration Solo and Incorruptible Flesh, a series of solo performances that reflect Athey’s collaborations with the late Lawrence Steger.

Gifts of the Spirit: Prophecy, Automatism and Discernment is Athey’s vision for an automatic writing machine brought to life in collaboration with composer and opera director Sean Griffin. Athey has been writing Gifts of the Spirit since 1980 when he moved away from the Pentecostal and Spiritualist practices in which he was raised. These writings describe his experience of growing up as a “living saint” within an environment of abuse, vibrating with the energy of the otherworldly and doing so without faith.

https://www.ronathey.org

Juanjosé Rivas
Juanjosé Rivas is a Mexican transmedia artist. His work is characterised by exploring the boundaries between sound, art and technology with a strong artistic background and a passion for experimentation. Throughout his artistic practice, Rivas has used a variety of media, including drawing, photography, video, sound installations, electro-acoustic compositions and live performances. His creations often involve the use of digital and electronic technologies, allowing him to expand the expressive possibilities of sound without separating from improvisation as the main resource, to elaborate a discourse through translation, error and interference within the different artistic languages.

In addition to his artistic work, Juanjosé Rivas has contributed significantly to the Mexican sound scene as director of VOLTA, improvisation and sound experimentation sessions with more than 12 years of work. He has given workshops and conferences on sound art, art and technology and creative processes and has collaborated with other artists and musicians in multidisciplinary projects.

He has been nominated twice for the CIFO-Ars Electronica Award (2022-2023) and been a member of the National System of Art Creators FONCA (2017-2020), Artist in residence at Sound Art and Experimental Music Program BEMIS Center for Contemporary Arts (2020), MATADERO in Madrid (2015), HANGAR Center for Artistic Creation in Barcelona (2011) and SBK in Karlsruhe Germany. Since 2003, he has given workshops, classes, seminars and conferences at different universities, schools and cultural centers in Mexico and abroad.

http://www.juanjoserivas.info/
https://juanjoserivas.bandcamp.com/

Chloë Sobek
Chloë Sobek is a composer-performer based in Naarm, Australia. Her work is currently centred on the development of a post-anthropocentric sonic practice that encompasses a diversity of enquiry from acoustemology through to noise music. She is invested in what creative practice can do to deconstruct and reshape the way we conceptualise our collective futures.

​Chloë’s practice is built around the Renaissance precursor to the double bass, the violone. Her creative process couples maximalist and musique concrète sensibilities such as audio-montage and electronic processing, with a handling of sound as a senate object, unlinked and undefined by its source.

​Chloë has won the 2022 Allan Zavod Performers’ Award, the Monash Jazz and Improvisation postgraduate award (2021), the Marten Bequest Scholarship (2020) and the RMIT Vice Chancellor’s Award (2019). Chloë has also been awarded funding from the Australia Council of the Arts, the City of Melbourne, the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and was a scholarship student at the Australian National Academy of Music.

She has presented research and work at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, at TENOR2022 and is co-editor of Recent Networked Music: Performing in and Composing for the Ether issue of Contemporary Music Review (Taylor and Francis). Recent composition and performance highlights include, with the support of the Australia Council of the Arts, the commission to write, record and perform a work for Outlier (Lizzy Welsh and Chloë Sobek) and Tilman Robinson at Melbourne Recital Centre and The Theatre Royal (2021). With the support of the Marten Bequest, the commission to compose and perform a contemporary work for violone (2020) and with the support of the Castlemaine State Festival, the commission to compose and perform an animated score for Outlier (2019).

​Chloe is a current PhD candidate at Monash University.

https://www.chloesobek.com
https://chloesobek.bandcamp.com/

Nephila
Is the solo sound and performance art project of Shannon A. Kennedy, a Los Angeles and rural New England artist, whose work focuses on the interplay between the worlds of nature and human construction. Shannon has been composing sound narrations, performing with hand made, physically activated instrument sculptures made from tree branches, natural materials and industrial metal objects for 25 years. Her art combines her work as an experimental sound artist, cellist and instrument builder, with her career as a theatrical scenic and costume designer and craftsperson, and a lifelong study of science, ecology and psychology. The work focuses on a viewpoint of our world as a series of elaborately interconnected networks, paying special attention to where the natural and human worlds intersect and effect one another in ways that are both harmonious and cacophonous. Shannon's method as an artist is in exploring non-verbal ways of storytelling by using sculptural sound makers, set pieces and physical movement to create abstract, immersive environments of sound and visual stimulus that tell a story and elicit a strong, visceral, emotional response from the audience.

In addition to her solo work under the moniker Nephila, Shannon has been a member of the experimental sound and performance art duo Pedestrian Deposit since 2008, with whom she has toured extensively throughout the United States and Europe, played countless performances and festivals in both traditional and non-traditional settings, released numerous recordings and participated in film scores.

https://monorailtrespassing.bandcamp.com/album/subcutaneous-memory

HidHawk
Transdisciplinary artist and curator
based in the Southern California - Northern Baja California region.

Co-founder of nettnett space in Tijuana.
@nettnett_radio

Explorer in the realms of artistic and holistic approaches to being and healing through sound frequencies, vibrations and music.
@mifrecuencia

Composer / producer / performer of electronic music aka AyDD / Hidhawk and drummer with Traviesas y Milagros
@haydeejimenez

Promoter of experimental / electronic musicians and artists of the region - Borderlandnoise. @borderlandnoisefest @borderlandnoise

Haydeé is a faculty member of the Art Departmenr at California State University Los Angeles teaching Art & Design in the Community and Social Engagement Through Fashion, Fiber & Materials.

https://haydeejimenez.net/INFO-1
https://haydeejimenez.net/music