Contents for August 8, 2017
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1. Martha Wilson, FF Alumn, in the Village Voice, Aug. 2
2. Martha Wilson, Marina Abramovic, Kathy Brew, Allen Ginsberg, Pat Oleszko, Nora Ligorano & Marshall Reese, Reverend Billy, Lucy Sexton, in The Brooklyn Rail, July 14
3. Lenora Champagne, FF Alumn, in Manhattan / Brooklyn, Aug. 9-Sept 14
4. Stanya Kahn, FF Alumn, at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens, thru Sept. 4
5. Morgan O’Hara, Amy Brook Snider, FF Alumns, at the New York Public Library, Manhattan, Nov. 12, and more
6. Terry Berkowitz, Francesc Torres, FF Alumns, now online
7. Cassils, FF Alumn, at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Manhattan, opening Sept. 16, and more
8. Jeff McMahon, FF Alumn, in Hyperallergic, now online, and more
9. Jacki Apple, FF Alumn, receives UCDA award of excellence
10. Linda Mary Montano, Ron Athey, FF Alumns, at the Broad, Los Angeles, CA, August 26
11. Cindy Sherman, FF Alumn, in the New York Times, August 6
12. Pope.L, FF Alumn, in Flint, MI
13. Robin Tewes, FF Alumn, at Golden Gallery, New Berlin, NY, thru Aug. 12
14. Split Britches, FF Alumn, at La MaMa, Manhattan, Sept. 19
15. Lucio Pozzi, FF Alumn, at Rizzuto Gallery, Palermo, Italy, Sept. 2
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1. Martha Wilson, FF Alumn, in the Village Voice, Aug. 2
This complete illustrated article can be found at https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/08/01/leo-fitzpatrick-the-kid-stayed-in-the-picture/ Text only follows below
The Village Voice
Leo Fitzpatrick: The Kid Stayed in the Picture
Two decades after starring as Telly the Virgin Surgeon in “Kids,” the Jersey skate rat has found a home in the art world
by MALLIKA RAO
AUGUST 1, 2017
Leo Fitzpatrick owes everything to his friends. One of the first was Ryan McGinley, now a photographer whose work hangs in the Whitney, but back in the day just another skinny skater kid from Jersey hopping turnstiles with Fitzpatrick, five bucks in their back pockets for a day in the city. Two dollars for train fare; three for a meal of soda and chips or iced tea and cookies. Then Washington Square Park or Astor Place or the Brooklyn Banks, on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, “the oldest running, most famous New York skateboard spot,” as Fitzpatrick calls it. “I remember telling kids in my town that I’d go to New York on the weekends, and they were like, ‘What? Why would you do that?’ I’m like, ‘Why aren’t you doing that? It’s right there!’ ” He and McGinley were on the same wavelength. “We would be the New Jersey guys coming to New York, and New Jersey guys always get hated on, so you stick together.”
Next was the old guy who showed up on the scene one day. “Why is this fifty-year-old guy riding a skateboard and hanging out taking pictures of everybody?” Fitzpatrick remembers thinking. But when Larry Clark asked him to be in a movie called Kids, full of sex and drugs and teenage rage, Fitzpatrick said yes. In a cast that included then-unknown future stars Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, Fitzpatrick is the first person you see, his character, Telly, so hard to love that the first time Fitzpatrick met Roger Ebert, the critic confessed he wanted to slap him in the face. The 1995 cult classic would prove a thorny gift for Fitzpatrick, a high school dropout from a blue-collar home, but Telly led to other acting gigs (The Wire, My Name Is Earl), enough to keep him solvent enough to hang, anyway. His crew – rising young artists like McGinley, Dan Colen, Dash Snow, Nate Lowman, and Terrence Koh – made not just art, but headlines in the gossip pages for their late-night, drug-fueled, graffiti-tagged misadventures.
“Leo’s what I always imagine hanging with a poet would be like,” Lowman tells me. “He was always the guy without the job, the opposite of a professional.” But now, however improbable it seems, Fitzpatrick – the forever kid – has somehow magicked a life that feels grown up, as co-director at the Marlborough Contemporary Gallery in Chelsea, where his new group show, “Feedback,” has drawn critical acclaim.
“I think if I’m lucky I’ll get to be a part of New York’s history, like guys like Taylor Mead or Rene Ricard,” Fitzpatrick says. “People I grew up looking up to, who sort of walk the line – nobody really knew what they did. They just did a lot of different things and they know a lot of cool people. Guys like John Lurie. They’re not famous, but they’re legends.”
The day before the opening at the Marlborough, Fitzpatrick celebrated his fortieth birthday. He didn’t have a party, just dinner with his wife, Chrissie Miller, though given his pre-adult vibe one might have expected Chuck E. Cheese’s. He eats like a kid, pizza and Coke, and dresses like one, too. A hint of the Telly drawl lingers out of the side of his mouth. At the gallery he was clad in black Dickies, a suit for a guy who’d rather not wear a real one. “His job in the art world makes perfect sense, but at the same time it’s also hilarious,” Lowman told me. “I mean that in an admirable, astounding way. It’s impressive and kind of magical.”
At a bar in the gallery’s front stood Martha Wilson, the seventy-year-old artist behind one of the city’s key avant-garde spaces, the Franklin Furnace. She offered guests bottles of Pacifico while wearing an acid-orange wig meant to evoke Donald Trump. A photograph of hers hung at the gallery’s rear, taken decades ago, of a boyfriend. She’d dressed him as Marcel Du-champ. The idea was to emasculate him a bit, she told me, to turn the power. The space’s two floors host more than seventy works from the past five decades, each honoring a loose theme about collaboration. A Richard Prince piece is meant as a troll, a joke the artist recorded with the sculptor Robert Gober, not for sale. On a far wall hangs a record of all the drugs Clark, the Kids director, ever took, listing some fairly staggering amounts. The animating spirit is of intimacy, a notion that’s “very Leo,” to cop a phrase Lowman used to describe his friend’s own artwork. “I do everything to impress my friends, really,” Fitzpatrick told me.
It seems to be working. “There’s something about this show that feels like the best reflection of all these years that he’s been learning and absorbing in this very quiet way,” says Colen. “He had no education. So he learned from his friends in a very systematic and direct way. It wasn’t, like, an accident.”
A real job, a wife, a baby at home. It all seems a bit like adulthood. Until recently Fitzpatrick had no health insurance, and so he used a trick his mom learned working switchboards at a hospital. “She’s the one that told me if I ever got hurt and it was an emergency to just go to the hospital and give them a fake name.” His cribbed the name of a skateboarding hero. Most injuries he fixed with superglue. Even a cut through his scalp healed that way. “You just squeeze, and squeeze,” he explained, pinching his flesh and an imaginary tube of glue. And then you skate some more. But one time he was hit by a car. He lay in the hospital for a week, under a fake name. They nearly had to amputate his leg. Every time they’d call him by his pseudonym, he’d get excited, forgetting it was meant to be his.
Fitzpatrick loves his mom. She let him do Kids, despite the sex. Didn’t flinch when he quit school after ninth grade to skate. She’s tough: worked as a maid most of her life and raised five kids after leaving Fitzpatrick’s dad, a janitor. Both parents came to the U.S. from Ireland in their teens, but his dad was bitter about what America gave him. Still, Fitzpatrick says, his siblings turned out great.
By the time Fitzpatrick hit his twenties, McGinley was starting to make a name for himself while studying photography at the School of Visual Arts; his stoop on 7th and A became the nexus for a burgeoning crew of hotshot young artists, some born to privilege, their lives assiduously documented by way of one another’s work. Journalists loved them, comparing the scene to the heyday of Warhol’s Factory, with Snow as the group’s unofficial mascot and muse. He came from the famous de Menil clan, the first family of the American art scene, modern-day Medicis. Fitzpatrick, meanwhile, was always around, the actor in a group of artists: at Lit, where he started to DJ, and Max Fish, a bar that hosted some of his early attempts at curating. In those small shows you could see the roots of “Feedback,” to date the largest he’s ever done.
Lowman describes his friend as someone with “the least traditional education of anybody I was really close with, but the one who read the most books.” (“I hated reading,” says Fitzpatrick, “until I found the right books.”) When the two got close they were living across from each other on the Lower East Side, on Attorney Street. Lowman was “confused,” he says, “an artist trying not to be an artist.” Between acting gigs, Fitzpatrick met him for coffee, lending him poetry, a genre Lowman hadn’t read since college. Those afternoons took on the air of readings, as did the company.
Along with Hanna Liden – another artist who used to share McGinley’s stoop – Fitzpatrick and Lowman co-founded the Home Alone gallery, first in Tribeca, then on the Lower East Side. Liden and Lowman were busy with their own art, so Fitzpatrick found himself running the operation, and enjoying it. Research, even emailing. Being wrong for the part. “I can get away with things,” he says. He’s heard that artists answer his emails because of how wrong they are, sent from a personal account with something goofy in the subject line. He likes having a role with his friends. “Before we started [Home Alone], I was just the actor in the group,” he says. “[Not] even a successful actor.”
“Ryan and I were trying to be artists, and Leo was trying to be an actor,” Colen recalls. “But he was always really fascinated by art. Always a fan.”
When he wasn’t acting, Fitzpatrick was educating himself. The late experimentalist Colin DeLand was an early mentor, co-founder of the New York Armory Show as well as the gallery American Fine Arts. “Colin had an open-door policy. He didn’t judge people,” Fitzpatrick says. Stepping into AFA, he felt comfortable being wrong. He came with another friend, Brian DeGraw, a musician in a band called Gang Gang Dance, who hung out at AFA with everyone else. “It was like small-town U.S.A. but in New York,” Fitzpatrick recalls. “A small scene within a bigger scene. Everybody was dating everybody. Everybody would go to hang at Pink Pony and Max Fish and AFA. I didn’t consider myself an AFA kind of person, even though I hung out. I was shy. I was on the outside.”
For Fitzpatrick, a guy whose identity is so bound up in his friendships, New York seems like a friend he’s starting not to know. In 2009, Snow died of a heroin overdose; in June, so did Benjamin Cho, the influential designer and DJ who “knew everyone.” Fitzpatrick’s fellow skaters and Kids co-stars Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter are long gone: Pierce took his own life in 2000, while Hunter died of a cocaine-induced heart attack in 2006. “I would say 90 percent of my friends are alcoholics and/or drug addicts,” Fitzpatrick says. “They’ve either gotten sober or passed away or something like that, but it’s weird when you realize a lot of your socializing revolved around bars and those kinds of things.”
Conversely, his East Village stomping grounds seem to be teetering on the brink of respectability – and thus demise. We pass a sign advertising cauliflower and kale, and Fitzpatrick scoffs. He lives off pizza, Coke, and cigarettes. Double-fists coffee in the morning. Sounds happy talking about the dead body he and his infant son encountered in Tompkins Square Park one morning. Food is “fuel”; no point sitting down or getting precious. “I like not having to tell them what I want,” he says of why he eats at a diner. Even in the old days, he liked to hide, DJ’ing while everyone danced. At one of his recent openings, he tended bar. But his neighborhood has started feeling foreign, with all the drunk brunch kids disturbing the peace on the weekends. He talks about moving upstate, chopping wood. “I’m not sure the city is built for longevity, as far as, like, a person’s psyche is concerned,” he says. “I don’t feel like I’m relevant enough.” He shrugs.
His son is a new friend. The title of the show at the Marlborough came from a performance piece from the 1970s, by the artist Dennis Oppenheim. The photo of the performance on display at the Marlborough depicts two bodies, the artist’s and his young son Erik’s. Their backs are bare, covered only with two long, twisted lines, one apiece. They are drawing with marker on each other. Below the image comes the explanation: I originate a movement which Erik translates and returns to me. What I get is my movement fed through his sensory system. The piece is called A Feed-Back Situation. “It’s like the ultimate bonding experience you could share with your child,” Fitzpatrick says. It captures his theme, his obsession with intimacy. “It’s really kind of sentimental.”
Even being antisocial is about being social. He likes being alone at the party: DJ’ing, bartending. He found that solitude young. Weed and alcohol made him more awkward around girls, so he went straight-edge for a few years. Then Kids came out and some things got worse. Telly is his inverse, driven to intimacy out of an absence of feeling. He sleeps with girls as conquests, and ruins the life of the one we’re meant to care for most, played by Sevigny. Fitzpatrick was a virgin when they shot. “I was already so awkward. Didn’t know how to talk to girls, I didn’t know anything. And then this movie made me seem like this evil guy,” he says. Having people “know and judge” him before they’d met could feel like a “handicap,” even once the emotion wore off. The judgments just changed. “Oh, this actor guy now wants to be a gallerist?” he deadpans. “Like, how cliché can you get?”
He’s too old to get on a board regularly, but he plans to buy one for his kid, probably on Canal Street. The shops near him have dried up. He tells me this matter-of-factly. If he has a religion, an imaginary friend, for hard times, it’s the one he found young. “Some people see a handrail as just a handrail,” he says. Skateboarders see it as a path, physical and metaphysical. “How do I manipulate this thing to do something cool on it? How do I take the few resources I have and do something cool?
“You look at the world differently. If I can’t go this way, how do I get there?”
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2. Martha Wilson, Marina Abramovic, Kathy Brew, Allen Ginsberg, Pat Oleszko, Nora Ligorano & Marshall Reese, Reverend Billy, Lucy Sexton, in The Brooklyn Rail, July 14
This complete illustrated article can be found at http://brooklynrail.org/2017/07/artseen/Artists-Rising
Text only follows below
Brooklyn Rail
ARTSEEN JULY 14TH, 2017
Artists Rising
by Kathy Brew
Art Rising took place at the Trump Tower Public Garden on June 14th, which happens to be Donald Trump’s birthday and Flag Day. It was the latest in a series of actions that have been using this not-so-known public space as a “living lab” to mobilize people around the risks of the Trump presidency-particularly his plan to slash federal funding for the arts.
The event was organized by Take Trump Tower, and curated by Caterina Bartha. As stated in the program notes: “The artists invite you to enjoy the performances and provoke Trump on his birthday inside his home.”
The crowd was mainly a mix of artists and activists, combined with tourists who were coming to the building because it is the home of the POTUS, including some Trump supporters who happened upon the event, along with some Trump Tower security folks hovering on the sidelines, observing with scrutiny (not to mention the presence of police and secret service members as you enter the building).
Things kicked off at noon with Brick x Brick, a group of women dressed in black and white outfits that included text of many of Trump’s misogynist quotes, standing firm as a wall/backdrop for the hour-long event. Lucy Sexton from Dancenoise, who performs as The Factress, was the emcee/host and welcomed Jimmy Van Bramer, the City Council majority leader and chairman of the council’s cultural affairs committee, who spoke of the importance of government funding and saving the NEA. Then the performances began.
Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Choir gave a fiery sermon, invoking the names of Allen Ginsburg, Pablo Neruda, Nina Simone, among other artists, while the choir gave the grand finale to the sermon with a protest song. Martha Wilson, founder of Franklin Furnace, who has impersonated figures such as Barbara Bush, Tipper Gore, and Nancy Reagan, channeled Trump, complete with an orange wig and red tie, giving a kind of history lesson of how she (as artist/art administrator) has seen the relationship of art and politics evolve during the last 50 years. And then she switched to her Trump persona:
Of course I want to de-fund the NEA-I want to eliminate the competition! And talk about audience response: Did you see how my approval ratings went up after I bombed Syria? And the applause I got in the Rose Garden when I pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord?
Artist Marshall Reese, part of the collaborative duo Ligorano/Reese, showed up with the most recent offering from their line of Pure Products: Dress for Distress Flag Pins, which are upside-down American flag pins. (The idea was triggered by an incident when Sean Spicer wore his flag pin the wrong way at a press briefing.)
The pin was intentionally launched on Flag Day and Reese came to pin the faux Donald as a way to underscore an urgent message that the country is in crisis, that we need to resist-“a symbol of a new kind of patriotism in the age of Trump.”
There were faux secret service agents lurking in the background while artist Pat Oleszko was off to the side in a performative installation that was a take-off of Marina Abramovic’s 2012 performance at MoMA, The Artist is Present. Except here, Oleszko, dressed as Lady Liberty, was seated in a chair with a sign reading, The Artists are Presceint (note misspelling), eyes locked in a stare-down contest with a Humpty-Dumpty like Trump effigy, and a faux cross-dressed Kellyanne Conway hovering behind.
For those who truly wish to honor and protect the values that America stands for, there will need to be many more risings of resistance. Stay tuned: the folks involved with Take Trump Tower have a calendar with upcoming events featuring teach-ins, demonstrations, and much more.
(https://www.taketrumptower.com)
CONTRIBUTOR
Kathy Brew
KATHY BREW is an independent filmmaker, artist, writer, curator, and educator. She teaches in graduate programs at The New School and The School of Visual Arts.
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3. Lenora Champagne, FF Alumn, in Manhattan / Brooklyn, Aug. 9-Sept 14
TRAPS : in a park or community space near you?
Greetings!
I will be performing, Traps, a solo about getting stuck on the subway, struggling with squirrels, and seeking the light, in public spaces in August and September, free of charge.
It would be lovely to see you, if you’re able to make it.
In the performance, I’ll talk about traps I encounter–both everyday and large scale–and wonder how to get past the obstacles that hinder us, both personally and as a society. Then I’ll open it up to the spectators, and facilitate an open-ended conversation about what we can do now.
Traps is made possible in part with public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. It is also made possible with support from the Purchase College Faculty Development Fund.
Locations, dates and times are:
Wednesday, August 9, Abingdon Square Park, 12th Street and Hudson, 4 p.m.
Thursday, August 10, Tompkins Square Park, East 10th btwn A & B, 4 p.m.
(meet outside Tompkins Square Library, 331 East 10th Street)
Friday, August 11, Hudson River Park at 11th Street (near the AIDS Memorial), 4 p.m.
Thursday, September 7, Seward Park, East Broadway, 4:30 p.m.
(meet outside Seward Park Library, 192 East Broadway)
Friday, September 8 Old Stone House, Washington Park, 336 3rd Street, Brooklyn, 4:30 p.m.
Thursday, September 14, Downtown Art Co., 70 East 4th Street, 2nd floor Community Space, 7 p.m.
Lenora Champagne
lenorachampagne.com
New World Plays, No Passport Press, 2015
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4. Stanya Kahn, FF Alumn, at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens, thru Sept. 4
Stanya Kahn: Stand in the Stream
Through September 4
MoMA PS1
Tickets available at MoMA PS1
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3866?locale=en
In Stand in the Stream, Stanya Kahn weaves together deeply personal and emphatically political imagery into a meditation on intimacy, alienation, and resistance. Both a work of mourning and a call to action, the film is also a documentary portrait of four generations of Kahn’s family: her grandmother, her mother, her son, and herself. MoMA PS1’s exhibition is the New York premiere and first museum presentation of this work.
Built from footage Kahn shot primarily over the past six years, Stand in the Stream records the artist in the act of both living and seeing, culminating in her activist mother’s decline into dementia and eventual death in 2015, and in events leading up to and surrounding the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. In a rhythmic flow of images, punctuated by irruptions of protest, solidarity, and violence, Kahn’s film charts the intersection between private and public life in today’s America.
The film’s title refers both to the stream of digital images and to Bertolt Brecht’s play, Man Equals Man, which deals with the ways in which human beings are instrumentalized in the manner of machines. As Kahn connects to random strangers in internet chatrooms while wearing Halloween monster masks, or voyeuristically records anonymous riders on the subway, she plays with distinctions between the intimacy of family and the estrangement of contemporary life.
The film’s sound design includes original compositions by Kahn and by musician/composer Alexia Riner. All footage is shot live or livestream screen-recorded in real time.
This presentation is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director, MoMA PS1, and Chief Curator at Large, The Museum of Modern Art.
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5. Morgan O’Hara, Amy Brook Snider, FF Alumns, at the New York Public Library, Manhattan, Nov. 12, and more
Please join Franklin Furnace Alumni Morgan O’Hara at the New York Public Library Rose Reading Room, or other locations outside New York City, for HANDWRITING THE CONSTITUTION.
Morgan O’Hara is a visual artist based in New York City. In January 2017, a time of stark political change in the United States, O’Hara felt the need to do something connected to her art practice that also addressed her political concerns and offered a sense of empowerment and encouragement to her community. Her practice of hand copying the Constitution of the United States – a document that is meant to protect the basic human rights of all American people provided focus. Through hand copying, the writer absorbs information experientially, making room for reflection, new realizations, and an embodied understanding of the text. When done as a community, a sense of collaboration surfaces and nourishes.
Please visit the website www.handwritingtheconstitution.com for more information about the project and how to take part.
Upcoming sessions:
Session 16
JULY / AUGUST 2017 (ongoing)
AT THE NEW HAMPSHIRE STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY FOR WOMEN
WITH LINDA GRAHAM
Session 17
SUNDAY 6 AUGUST FROM 2:00 TO 4:00PM
AT THE FLOYD MEMORIAL LIBRARY
539 FIRST STREET – GREENPORT, NEW YORK 11944
WITH POPPY JOHNSON
SESSSION 18
SUNDAY 13 AUGUST FROM 1:00 TO 5:00PM
AT LE PAIN QUOTIDIEN CAFÉ
SIXTH AVENUE AND BLEECKER STREET, NEW YORK CITY
WITH MORGAN O’HARA
SESSION 19
SUNDAY 24 SEPTEMBER FROM 12 NOON TO 4:00PM
AT THE ROSE ROOM OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
NEW YORK CITY
WITH LISA BLAS
SESSION 20
SUNDAY 8 OCTOBER FROM 1:00PM TO 4:00PM
AT THE ROSE ROOM OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
NEW YORK CITY
WITH THIERRY DE DUVE
SESSION 21
SUNDAY 12 NOVEMBER 2017 FROM 12 NOON – 4PM
AT THE ROSE ROOM OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
NEW YORK CITY
WITH AMY BROOK SNIDER
SESSION 22
SATURDAY 9 DECEMBER 2017 FROM 12 NOON – 4PM
AT THE ROSE ROOM OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
NEW YORK CITY
WITH MORGAN O’HARA
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6. Terry Berkowitz, Francesc Torres, FF Alumns, now online
[Francesc Torres, FF Alumn, was inadvertently omitted from this listing in last week’s Goings On.]
From La Voz de Galicia
One among several, in Gallego.
Best, terry berkowitz
http://www.lavozdegalicia.es/noticia/cultura/2017/07/31/abundancia-parabola/0003_201707G31P29991.htm
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7. Cassils, FF Alumn, at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Manhattan, opening Sept. 16, and more
CASSILS SOLO: MONUMENTAL
RONALD FELDMAN FINE ARTS, NYC
SEPTEMBER 16- OCTOBER 28
LIVE PERFORMANCE AT OPENING RECEPTION: SEPTEMBER 16: 6-8 PM
Monumental is Cassils’ second solo show at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts and a new project of Creative Capital. The exhibition includes monuments made from precious metals and bodily waste, visceral sound and video installations, photographs and live performance. The centerpiece is PISSED, a minimalist glass cube containing 200 gallons of urine: a collection of all the liquid the artist has passed since the Trump administration rescinded an Obama-era executive order allowing transgender students to use the bathroom matching their chosen gender identities. The sculpture is contextualized by audio recordings from the Virginia school board and the Fourth Court of Appeals articulating the ignorance and biases that run through every level of judicial proceedings. Alchemized, a series of torqued metallic abstractions, gilds and exalts self-determined trans embodiment. Fountain, a live performance in which Cassils is cathetered and linked to the glass cube via medical tubing, links the beauty of the glowing liquid back to the medicalized trans body.
Resilience of the 20%, a bronze sculpture cast from the bashed clay remnant of Cassils’ previous performance, Becoming An Image, acts as a monument to the resilience of queer communities. The title underscores a sickening statistic: in 2012, murders of trans people increased by 20 percent worldwide. The film Monument Push documents a performance that mobilizes the bronze sculpture as a collective action. The performance took place in Omaha where members of the local LGBTQI+ community joined in pushing the one-ton monument to local sites of trauma, resilience, and survival, including a prison where LGBT youth of color are incarcerated.
Inextinguishable Fire is a performance for the camera that engages spectators with the media’s constructed images of violence and war. Cassils performs a treacherous fire stunt using Hollywood techniques: the 14-second live burn (limited to the length of a single exhale to protect the esophagus) is extended to 14 minutes of slow motion flame, shot at 1000 frames per second. Accompanying the looping projection is Encapsulated Breath, amorphously shaped glass blown sculptures that encapsulate the form of a single breath, resembling fragile speech bubbles and speaking to the precarity of the voice and political expression.
A golden hue glows through the aesthetic of the exhibition: the orange lick of slow motion flame projected from Inextinguishable Fire dances across the fragile glass of the Encapsulated Breath sculptures. In Resilience of the 20%, the bronze gleams, polished by the collective touch and grip of those who struggled to heave its weight through the cobblestoned streets of Omaha, Nebraska. The minimalist glass sculpture PISSED premieres when our political climate is soaked with oppression, injecting urgent content into pure form.
CURRENT AND UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
Cassils has several exhibitions on this summer and upcoming fall. As well Cassils recently performed Becoming An Image to a sold out audience in Brighton UK as part of Trans Pride at the Marlborough Festival and had a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of the Republic of Macedonia in Skopje, Macedonia
Art on the Front Lines
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
NY, NY
May 24- August 19, 2017
Visual Notes From an Upside Down World
P.P.O.W. Gallery
NY, NY
June 29- August 18, 2017
Seen & Heard
Everson Museum
Syracuse, NY
June 10- August 27, 2017
Digital Aura
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
Madison, WI
May 20- August 17, 2017
Declaration
VCU Institute for Contemporary Art
Richmond, VA
CCA Hubbell Street Galleries at California College of the Arts
Spring 2018
Stanford University-
Curating a series of performances throughout the academic year 2017-2018
Teaching Social Sculpture in the Spring Semester 2018
Performing new work Spring 2018
Perth International Arts Festival, Perth, Australia
2019
BIOGRAPHY
Cassils is from Montreal, Canada and based in Los Angeles. Cassils is represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include: Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and MU Eindhoven, Netherlands. Cassils’ work has also been featured at the key art for the blockbuster exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum and the Schwules Museum*, DE, The National Theatre as part of the SPILL Festival of Performance, U.K. and the ANTI Contemporary Performance Festival, FI. Cassils is the recipient of a Guggenhime Fellowship (2017), a COLA Fellowship (2017) and a Creative Capital Award (2015). They have also received numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts (2002-2016), a Alpert Visiting Artist Fellowship from Syracuse University (2016), California Community Foundation Grant, and a MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award. Cassils has lectured at museums, universities and colleges across the globe such as Goldsmiths University, U.K; Stanford University and the New School Parsons. Cassils films have premiered at Sundance Film Festival, Utah, Out Fest, Los Angeles and the Institute for Contemporary Art, London.
For a full list of past exhibitions and accolades, go here
CONTACT:
cassils.studio@gmail.com
www.cassils.net
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
http://www.feldmangallery.com
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8. Jeff McMahon, FF Alumn, in Hyperallergic, now online, and more
JEFF MCMAHON review of John O’Reilly exhibition at Worcester Art Museum published in Hyperallergic
https://hyperallergic.com/392953/john-o-reilly-a-studio-odyssey-worcester-art-museum-2017/
and his obit for director Steven Kent published in American Theatre
http://www.americantheatre.org/2017/07/21/director-educator-activist-steven-kent-1943-2017/
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9. Jacki Apple, FF Alumn, receives UCDA award of excellence
Great news. The exhibition catalog “Yoshio Ikezaki: Elements” written, edited, and art directed by Jacki Apple and designed and art directed by Winnie Li, has just won an award of excellence from the UCDA (University & College Designers Association). It will appear in the 2017 Design Show in Baltimore and will be catalogued into the UCDA’s permanent design collection archives.
Thank you to the whole design team at Art Center College of Design — Winnie, Audrey, and Ellie. And Steve Nowlin, Williamson Gallery Director.
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10. Linda Mary Montano, Ron Athey, FF Alumns, at the Broad, Los Angeles, CA, August 26
The Broad, various locations
221 S. Grand Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
https://www.thebroad.org/programs/summer-happenings-broad-oracle
August’s Summer Happening is inspired by themes of globalization, surveillance and the underlying systems and forces at work in the world that make up the current exhibition Oracle. Oracle the Happening strives to reclaim that heightened experience and anxiety as artists pick up abundant stereotypes and play prophet, sage, historian and cheerleader. A Place to Bury Strangers performs what could be a soundtrack for the apocalypse, while Xiu Xiu make music for people opposed to and opposed by the horror and disquiet of life. Transformative performance artist Linda Mary Montano offers healings and blessings, and Keijaun Thomas will perform his work, “Distance is not Separation”. The third-floor galleries will feature a Xenolalia room – the Christian missionary spirit gift or ability to speak in an unlearned language – with poets Raquel Gutiérrez, Elliot Reed and Lisa Teasley, and musicians Gabie Strong, Pauline Gloss and David Harrow.
Guest Curators
Ron Athey is a performance artist associated with Los Angeles music scenes, body art and a 1990s response to HIV/AIDS. His first outing was Premature Ejaculation, a noise/actionist group started with Rozz Williams in 1981. Athey has toured performance projects internationally, including commissions from the English Arts Council, MADRE Napoli and Kampnagel Hamburg. In 2013 Dominic Johnson produced an extensive monograph on Intellect Press: Pleading in the Blood: The Art and Life of Ron Athey. Curatorially, Athey has, alongside his collaborator Vaginal Davis, co-curated the Visions of Excess events at Platinum Oasis/OUTFEST, Fierce Festival Birmingham, UK and Aksioma/Kapelica at Castle Codelli in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Athey is currently working on a participant-based automatism project with the composer and opera director Sean Griffin.
James Spooner is a working artist from New York living in Los Angeles. He first gained recognition with his critically acclaimed cult documentary “Afro-punk,” which provided the inspiration for the Afropunk festivals that James also co-founded and co-curated for 4 years before leaving the organization. He has spent the last decade tattooing in his Los Angeles private studio Monocle Tattoo, where he developed a pioneering vegan tattoo procedure. Currently he is finishing his first graphic novel in which he is both the author and illustrator.
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11. Cindy Sherman, FF Alumn, in the New York Times, August 6
Please visit this link:
thank you.
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12. Pope.L, FF Alumn, in Flint, MI
Mitchell-Innes & Nash is excited to announce the launch of Pope.L’s Kickstarter campaign for Flint Water Project, an art installation, performance and intervention that calls attention to the water crisis in Flint by bottling Flint tap water and putting it on display in Detroit at artist-run gallery What Pipeline.
Live through September 5, 2017, the Kickstarter fundraiser will secure final funding for the project and spread the word about the exhibition and art edition.
Conceived by Pope.L as “one Midwest city helping another struck by similar blight” proceeds from the sales of Flint Water will be donated to the United Way of Genesee County and Hydrate Detroit.
Flint Water Project is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of its Knight Arts Challenge, Mitchell-Innes & Nash and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.
For more information about Pope.L, please visit http://www.miandn.com/artists/pope-l
For more information about What Pipeline, please visit http://whatpipeline.com/
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13. Robin Tewes, FF Alumn, at Golden Gallery, New Berlin, NY, thru Aug. 12
I’m eternally grateful to the Golden Foundation and want to share with you their benefit auction that I’m part of.
Thanks,
Robin Tewes
We will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Golden Foundation, with an art benefit auction on August 12, 2017. Funds raised from the sale of paintings will be used to grow the endowment, and support the residency program.
www.paddle8.com/auction/golden-foundation
All the artworks are currently hung in the Golden Gallery at 188 Bell Road for viewing. If you can make your way to New Berlin, we’d love to have you visit on August 12th.
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14. Split Britches, FF Alumn, at La MaMa, Manhattan, Sept. 19
Save the Date
La MaMa in Association with Spiderwoman Theater
P R E S E N T S
a Loose Change Production
A theatrical benefit celebrating Spiderwoman
September 19, 2017
The Ellen Stewart Theatre
La MaMa, 66 East 4th Street, NYC
7:30 pm – Tribute Performance Bash
10:30 pm – After-Party Concert, A Tribe Called Red
Featuring: Alessandra Belloni, Murielle Borst-Tarrant, Taylor Mac, Monique Mojica, Soni Moreno, Split Britches, Kevin Tarrant and the SilverCloud Singers, Talking Band, Josephine Tarrant . . . and Spiderwoman Theater!
For tickets, go to www.spiderwomantheater.org or click button below
SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR ADVISORY COMMITTEE
JoAnne Akalaitis, Carolyn Antonio, Holly Block, Kat Griefen, Karmenlara Ely, Teresa Eyring, Shanna Heap of Birds, Winona LaDuke, Dena Muller, Elizabeth A. Sackler, Jeannie Shenandoah, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Streb
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15. Lucio Pozzi, FF Alumn, at Rizzuto Gallery, Palermo, Italy, Sept. 2
Lucio Pozzi
Palermo, Italy
http://www.palermotoday.it/eventi/mostra-lucio-pozzi-rizzuto-gallery.html
A Rizzutogallery production.
Lucio Pozzi
Se lo agguanti, non c’è più / If you catch it, it’s not there.
Una azione in Pacciamìna / A Patchameena action.
Katharina Maderthaner
Chi dice A, deve anche dire B / Who says A, must also say B.
Costruzione / Construction
Gianni Gebbia
Sax and live electronics music
2 settembre 2017 – ore 19:00 / 2 September 2017 – 7:00 PM
I started producing actions towards the end of the 60’s as part of my project of redefining painting from inside and outside it’s field. One of the themes I follow is the tension between sense and nonsense in art. It became natural to write various texts in understandable words and as a counterpart to explore the power of phonetic meaningless speech. I have delivered whole lectures in my imaginary improvised Patchameena language. Using it, I have held speeches, recited guided tours with musical accompaniment, spoken in videos, written texts. Patchameena is the name given it by my autistic brother Marcello during our childhood games. Now in Palermo I am presenting a speech divided in parts staged in a structure by Katharina Maderthaner. My voice interweaves with the sounds by Gianni Gebbia.
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Goings On is compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
