[spectre] PRESS RELEASE: Highways Performance Space Presents somatic SENSOR

[micha cárdenas]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PERFORMANCE, VISUAL ART

[image: virus.circus.breath at MCASD]

Micha Cárdenas & Elle Mehrmand

CONTACT: Patrick Kennelly
(310) 453-1755
admin at highwaysperformance dot org

Highways Performance Space <http://www.highwaysperformance.org/> Presents
somatic SENSOR, featuring Performance, Digital and Networked Media, Drawing
and Soft Sculpture that Opens Borders Between Realities and Bodies

Friday and Saturday, January 21 + 22, 2011 at 8:30pm
Highways Performance Space
at the 18th Street Arts Center
1651 18th Street; Santa Monica, CA 90404

Micha Cárdenas & Elle Mehrmand

Santa Monica, CA – Highways Performance Space Artistic Director Leo Garcia
presents somatic SENSOR, curated by Micha Cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand, and Dino
Dinco. Emerging out of queer experience, the works in somatic SENSOR move
along lines of flight exploring desire, technology, the erotic and the
viral. Rejecting control society to find new forms of relationality, somatic
SENSOR includes performances, digital and networked media, drawing and soft
sculpture to open borders between realities and bodies. The performance
nights include work by Robert Crouch, Micha Cárdenas, Dino Dinco, Dawn
Kasper, Frankie Martin, Elle Mehrmand, Zac Monday, Yann Novak, Phil Skaller,
Samuel White, Dorian Wood, and Suzanne Wright. The gallery show, from
January 14-22, 2011 includes works by Sadie Barnette, Zach Blas, Amy Sara
Carroll, Brianna Rigg and Suzanne Wright.

Suzanne Wright

Highways Performance Space is located at 1651 18th Street, in Santa Monica,
CA, 1/2 block north of Olympic Blvd. Tickets are $15 general admission and
$10 for members/students/seniors. Buy your tickets online @
www.highwaysperformance.org. Call 310-315-1459 for show information and to
reserve.

Some of the work in somatic SENSOR includes:

Micha Cárdenas & Elle Mehrmand’s “virus.circus” is an episodic series of
performances using wearable electronics, soft sensors and live audio to
bridge virtual and physical spaces. The performances explore possible queer
futures of latex sexuality amidst a speculative world of virus hysteria. The
history of queer politics shows that the rhetoric of viruses such as HIV are
used to control marginalized populations, while the present transnational
politics of viruses such as H1N1 unearth the militarization of medical
authority, microscopic migrations and global inequities. Code switching
between mixed and alternate reality, “virus.circus” asks how we can use
reality as a medium, resonating across a number of modes including public
space interventions, performances in museums and galleries and networked
performances. Wearable sensors allow the performers to experiment with
transreal embodiment, moving their physical bodies and Second Life avatars
simultaneously.

Zac Monday

"Casbahtic" is an assemblage of queer identified sound, performance and
visual artists who will be combining field recordings, live audio, on-stage
audio manipulation, costume and physical movement, in an original work
created for Highways Performance Space.  Artist Dino Dinco has brought
together Robert Crouch, Yann Novak and Dorian Wood with the goal of using
recording and performative strategies to collectively investigate Highways
as an aural, visual and social site from which to investigate, sample,
document and exhibit.  The artists' field work, analysis, interpretation and
dialogue coalesce within these live performances and the work becomes fully
realized by the spectatorship of the audience.

<http://transreal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/casbahtic-web1.jpg>

Casbahtic, Dino Dinco, Robert Crouch, Yann Novak and Dorian Wood

Zach Blas’ “Queer Technologies (QT)” is an organization - an art collective
and an activist group - that produces a critical product line for queer
technological agency, interventions, and social formation. QT products
include transCoder, a queer programming anti-language;
ENgenderingGenderChangers, a “solution” to Gender Adaptersʼ male/female
binary; Gay Bombs, a technical manual manifesto that outlines a “how to” of
queer networked activism; and GRID a mapping application that tracks the
dissemination of QT products and maps the “battle plans” for Quee
Technologies to more thoroughly infect networks of capital. QT products are
often displayed and deployed at the Disingenuous Bar (a play/attack on
Apple’s Genius Bar), which offers a heterotopic space for political support
for “technical” problems. QT products are also shop-dropped in various
consumer electronics stores, such as Best Buy, Circuit City, Radio Shack,
and Target.

Dawn Kasper presents a new piece from an ongoing project series entitled
visual poems: studies in time and space. This new piece titled “On Moving
and Motion” will investigate Kasper’s fascination with questions of gender.
Kasper challenges her idiosyncratic relationship to meaning through the
exploration of life and death, finding fleeting cognitive and emotional
understanding through a physical process articulated through a series of
charged, raw actions.

Dawn Kasper

Brianna Rigg’s sculpture “Hot Diggity Dog, 2010,” is an arrangement that
consists of a pink baroque flower vase, the top of a puzzle box with an
image of hot dogs on it, and a tube of vintage contact paper that is an
appropriation of patterning from the south pacific islands. The resulting
form resembles a staff or a spear that is composed of phallic and vaginal
parts. Thus the rearrangement of these objects that serve as platforms for
the proliferation of cultural tropes, obscures their purpose and exploits
their capacity to relay multiple meanings. By deconstructing the mass
produced object and calling into question the origin and intentionality of
these forms, Rigg’s is queering, challenging, or toying with the dominant
cultural discourse of themass produced good.

Suzanne Wright's ‘Accelerator’ 2008-2010 is a 14 ft wide by 7ft high colored
pencil drawing on paper depicting the Large Hadron Collider, a giant
scientific instrument used to study the smallest known particles. It is
rendered in a rainbow spectrum and two gigantic disembodied hands, an
amalgam of my own and close friend, grasp the structure from the sides, one
from underneath takes hold, and the other hovers above the tunnel about to
reach inside or grab the tiny man standing on the lower edge looking at me,
the viewer. Are they the hands of a giant, or the fabricators? My own? or
Gods? This is a gesture that encompasses multiple acts, a halting of
technology and an opening to the body, the big bang and the thrust of sex,
“the origins of the universe”.

BIOS:

Sadie Barnette is from Oakland, California. Using drawing, photography, and
objects she constructs a visual language system out of sub-culture codes and
west coast vernacular. She received her BFA from CalArts in 2006, and is
currently pursuing her Masters in Visual Arts at the University of
California, San Diego.

Zach Blas is an artist and writer working at the intersections of networked
media, queerness, and the political. He is particularly interested in
activist art that address the methods and styles in which technologies,
bodies, and capital impact, reconstitute, and proliferate assemblages of
sexuality, gender, and knowledge, alongside the potentials and possibilities
of reshaping these assemblages as well as reconfiguring un/human modes of
agency and resistance. His current project, Queer Technologies, is an
organization that develop applications and situations for queer intervention
and social formation. Zach has recently exhibited at the Los Angeles
Contemporary Exhibitions, File Electronic Language International Festival in
Brazil and the 2010 Arse Elektronika Festival in San Francisco, where he was
the recipient of a Prixxx Arse Elektronika.

Micha Cárdenas is an artist/theorist whose transreal work mixes physical and
networked spaces in order to explore emerging forms of queer relationality,
biopolitics and DIY horizontal knowledge production. She is the Associate
Director of Art and Technology for the Culture, Art and Technology program
in Sixth College at UCSD. She has been a lecturer in the Visual Arts
department and Critical Gender Studies program at UCSD, and an
artist/researcher with the b.a.n.g. lab and the UCSD School of Medicine. Her
recent publications include “I am Transreal”, in Gender Outlaws: The Next
Generation from Seal Press, Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, with Barbara
Fornssler, from Atropos Press and “Becoming Dragon: A Transversal Technology
Study” in Code Driftfrom CTheory. Her collaboration with Elle Mehrmand,
“Mixed Relations,” was the recipient of the UCIRA Emerging Fields Award for
2009. She has exhibited and performed in biennials, museums and galleries in
cities around the world including Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana, New York,
San Francisco, Montreal, Egypt, Ecuador, Spain, Saas-Fee, Switzerland,
Dublin, Ireland and many other places. Her work has been written about in
publications including Art21, the Associated Press, the LA Times, CNN, BBC
World, Wired and Rolling Stone Italy.

Amy Sara Carroll is an assistant professor of American Culture, Latina/o
Studies, and English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her critical
essays and poetry have appeared in various journals and anthologies,
including TDR, Signs, Representación y fronteras: el performance en los
límites del género, HOW2, Jubilat, LesVoz, The Iowa Review, This Bridge We
Call Home, and Not For Mothers Only. With Micha Cárdenas, Ricardo Dominguez,
Elle Mehrmand, and Brett Stalbaum, she’s collaborated on the Transborder
Immigrant Tool (2007- ). Her first book of poetry and prints, Secession, is
forthcoming in black-and-white and limited color editions from Hyperbole
Books (an imprint of San Diego State University Press).

Robert Crouch is a Los Angeles based artist and curator who works across a
wide range of media including photography, sound, installation, video, and
sculpture. He has exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and
London and released music on Dragon’s Eye Recordings, Untitled & After and
Loöq, and has work forthcoming on Slow Flow Rec. (Japan).

Dino Dinco is an artist, curator, filmmaker and photographer. His
photographic work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Paris (2005,
2001), Los Angeles (2001), and San Francisco (2009, 2004), as well as in
group shows in London, Mexicali, Paris, Santiago de Compostela, Los Angeles,
Antwerp, Hasselt (Belgium), New York and Hamburg. His images have appeared
in publications such as surface (US), i-D (UK), Dutch (France), Revista
Espacio (Mexico), V (US), SPEX (Germany), Vogue Brasil (Brazil), Tokion
(Japan), BIG (US), Studio Voice (Japan), Zoo (France), BUTT (Holland), and
stimuli (Malaysia) as well as in the photography anthologies: Sample
(Phaidon, 2005), Archeology of Elegance (Schirmer / Mosel, 2002), and Cross
(Calloway, 2000). In 2010, Dinco curated GUTTED, a five-hour performance art
exhibition at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions that focused on how
artists speak from / of / to the body and inspired by Corpus, a work by
Jean-Luc Nancy. GUTTED featured 71 artists and performers with durational
and short-form actions and readings. Through a grant from London’s St.
Martins College of Art and Design, Dinco was commissioned by the Fashion in
Film Festival 2008 to make the award-winning short film, “El Abuelo,” which
premiered at the Tate Modern in London, May 2008, and has since screened at
film festivals worldwide. He is currently finishing production on “Homeboy,”
a feature length documentary film about gay Latino men who were in gangs.

Dawn Kasper is a Los Angeles based mixed media performance artist actively
exploring the woven web of questions into the meaning of life and death.
Kasper has performed and exhibited, nationally and internationally, at
galleries and institutions including the Migros Museum Für Genenwartskunst
in Zurich, LISTE Basel, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Art Basel Art Positions,
Miami, LACMA, LACE, The Hammer, MOCA, Newman Popiashvili Gallery, New York,
Anna Helwing Gallery, Circus Gallery, Leo Koenig Inc., Projekte, New York;
had video screenings at Art in General New York, Copy Gallery Philadelphia,
and David Castillo Gallery Miami. Kasper is also one of the founding members
of the performance and experimental art venue Human Resources in Los
Angeles.

Frankie Martin

Intermedia artist Frankie Martin, enjoys a BI lifestyle; BIcycling
BI-coastally while writing her autoBIography.  Using comedy as a frame of
reference, Frankie’s work, which includes both video and hyper masculine
performance, opens the door to a radical re-thinking of the social
construct. Where is the private space on the internet?  Frankie complicates
the idea of what is appropriate via confusing semi-public space for private,
creating homosocial spaces, abstracting language and exposing the banality
of choosing one's social network. Frosze is her collaboration with Rose
Marcus, a BI-coastal performance duo whose deletion of the third and fourth
walls challenges the the audience with simultaneous antagonism and emotional
generousness. Frankie is currently represented by CANADA in New York City
and has shown work at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Moore Space,
Little Cakes Little Gallery and more. Frankie is currently attending the MFA
program at the University of California San Diego.

Elle Mehrmand is a performance/new media artist and musician who uses the
body, electronics, video, sound and installation within her work. She is the
singer and trombone player of Assembly of Mazes, a music collective who
create dark, electronic, middle eastern, rhythmic jazz rock. Elle is
currently an MFA candidate at UCSD, and received her BFA in art photography
with a minor in music at CSULB. Elle has received grants from UCIRA, the
Russell Foundation and Fine Arts Affiliates. She is a researcher at CRCA and
the b.a.n.g. lab at UCSD. Her performances have been shown in Long Beach,
Los Angeles, Tijuana, Montreal, Dublin, San Diego and Bogotá, Colombia. Her
work has been discussed in Art21, the LA Times, Furtherfield.org, Reno News
and Review and the OC Weekly.

Zac Monday is a graduate of the MFA program at University of California in
San Diego. He received his BFA in Sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth
University in 2007, while being an active participant in the Richmond Art
community. His crochet work and drawings are animated through emotional
rituals and mystical experiences that dictate how a viewer and the maker
interact with Art work. The constant question of comfort ability is etched
into figures that exist yet should not exist, are the accumulations of
fantasies but must reside in reality.

Yann Novak is a sound, video and installation artist living and working in
Los Angeles. His work utilizes different forms of digital documentation as a
point of departure. Through the digital manipulation of these sound and
image files, his works serve as a translation from documents of personal
experiences into an open ended autobiographical narrative. By choosing
subject matter that is also relatable to the audience, Novak’s work creates
a hybrid state, balancing between his own personal history and that of the
audience.

Brianna Rigg grew up in Southern Oregon. She Attended The Evergreen State
College in Olympia Washington where she received her Bachelors Degree in
2002.  She pursued post baccalaureate studies at Cal State Long Beach from
2006-2008. Brianna’s recent exhibitions include: Mourning California,
Periscope Projects, San Diego, 2010, Never Took the Drugs I Meant to Take,
solo exhibition, Marcuse Gallery, UCSD, La Jolla CA, 2009, The Dark Tower,
Compactspace gallery, Los Angeles CA 2009, Positive Negative Feedback Loop,
Marcuse Gallery, UCSD, La Jolla CA, 2009, The Fucking Train Wreck, Marcuse
Gallery, UCSD, La Jolla CA, 2009, Desire and the Object, Gatov Gallery,
CSULB, Long Beach CA, 2007, and The Electronic Arts Show, Werby Gallery,
CSULB, Long Beach CA, 2007.

Samuel White currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received his
degree from UCLA and attended the Independent Arts Research Program at
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (2004-2005). White’s work explores
temporal experiences that investigate the unconscious and absurdities of
everyday life. He has exhibited his performance works and film projects at
Conflux City, New York; The Company Gallery, Los Angeles; Highways
Performance Space, Los Angeles; LACE, Los Angeles; and Rosa Centro de
Arte/Medios, Mexicali, among others.

Samuel White

Los Angeles-based singer/artist Dorian Wood is "armed with a vocal charisma
that would befit a preacher and an experimental streak that would make
avant-gardists swoon" (WNYC Culture). He has held audiences captive for
years on street corners, in concert halls and performance spaces throughout
the US, Mexico and Europe, carrying with him a sound that marries troubadour
balladry with the avant-garde, both as a soloist and as a member of the
30-piece experimental orchestra, Killsonic. In early 2010, Dorian was joined
onstage by legendary artist Little Annie at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York.
Most recently, Dorian received critical praise for his performance and
"picture perfect" art direction (Los Angeles Times) in the Killsonic opera,
Tongues Bloody Tongues, presented at the REDCAT in Los Angeles. As a
performance artist, Dorian's work has been exhibited at Los Angeles
Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Highways Performance Space, Pacific Design
Center and other creative spaces in Los Angeles, New York and the UK.
Dorian's latest album, Brutus, was recorded live at St. Giles-in-the-Fields
in London, during his spring 2010 European tour. He is currently working on
a new studio album, entitled Rattle Rattle, which is due for release next
year.

Suzanne Wright was born in New London, Connecticut. She earned her BFA at
Cooper Union and MFA at the University of California in San Diego. Recently
she was included in the San Diego NOW show at the Oceanside museum of Art,
in Oceanside, CA in 2009 and a recent solo show curated by Darin Klein, at
Amy Adler’s Echo Park studio in Los Angeles. This was an ambitious five-week
exhibition and residency. The works in the show were large-scale drawings,
wall constructed paintings and intricately pigmented, cast and assembled
sculptures. During the show Suzanne hosted a weekly series of performances,
readings, one night group shows, and a queer zine release. She has shown
internationally and across the US with three solo shows in New York,
Dechira/stewart Gallery in 2000 , Stefan Stux in 2001, and Monya Rowe In
2004 - when she also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In
2006 she was included in exhibitions at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and
at Wizenhausen, Amsterdam. Recently her work was part of the group show
“Empire of this” at Claire Oliver Gallery in NY, “Sexy times “ at
Morgen/lehman Gallery in NY and “I-podism “ in Galway Ireland. Suzanne
Wright’s work can be seen in many publications including ‘Armpit of the
Mole’ and ‘Into the Abyss’ by Adam Putnam and ‘Art and Queer Culture’ by
Phaidon press(2011). In 2006 she founded a bi-annual art event showing the
work of contemporary artists at her home in the Catskills, NY called ‘Future
86’. She is in the process of creating a summer exhibition space and after
completing this years art happening is now planning the summer of 2011 show.
Suzanne will be having two upcoming Solo shows in the spring of 2011, at
Common Wealth and Council and ACP(Artist Curated Projects) in Los Angeles.

Highways Performance Space is in its 22nd year as Southern California’s
boldest center for new performance, promoting the development of
contemporary, socially involved artists and art forms from diverse local,
national and international communities. Artistic Director Leo Garcia
continues to affirm Highways mission of developing and presenting innovative
performance. For more information, photos or interviews, please
contact Patrick Kennelly, Associate Artistic Director at 310-453-1755.

###

-- 
micha cárdenas
Associate Director of Art and Technology
Culture, Art and Technology Program, Sixth College, UCSD

Co-Author, Trans Desire / Affective Cyborgs, Atropos Press,
http://is.gd/daO00
Artist/Researcher, UCSD School of Medicine
Artist/Theorist, bang.lab, http://bang.calit2.net

blog: http://transreal.org

gpg: http://is.gd/ebWx9
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