DIY Utopia(s)
Curated by Sierra Ortega
JUNE 19, 2020 7:30pm VIA ONLINE PLATFORM
Featuring work by: Kennie Zhou, Vyczie Dorado, Nicole Goodwin, and april vendetta.
“Queerness is not yet here…but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.” (José Esteban Muñoz)
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 32% of teens and 31% of adults suffer from some form of anxiety. It has become a multi-generational epidemic paralyzing our ability to create a self- determined future. We opt for convivence instead of community. And so, I ask the following questions: How can our relations be used to generate liberatory topographies? How can we manifest the future together? This proposal is an invitation to collectively experience the precarious space of creation. We will gather for an evening of performance art, to share in space and conversation about the work of four queer artists who each uniquely embody the kinds of collective and DIY artistic practice that can transform the anxiety of the present moment into actions that gesture toward new futures. This evening will feature work by Kennie Zhou, Vyczie Dorado, Nicole Goodwin, and april vendetta.
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Curator Bio:
Sierra Ortega is a genderqueer, interdisciplinary performance and new media artist and curator based in Queens, NY. Utilizing their background in performance, speculative philosophy, and queer and feminist politics, they have come to develop an artist/scholar practice that is deeply personal, constantly chaotic, and furiously DIY. Their work seeks the limits of human affective capacity as a means to generate post-capitalist futures of constant transformative mutation. Most recently, they have curated work at Local Project Space, The Center for Performance Research, Café Beit, and The Hollows Artspace.
Artist Bios:
Kennie Zhou aka Kendergartener is a Chinese artist based in Brooklyn, trained as a director and performer at NYU Tisch. They make performances that are inspired by butoh, drag, noise performance, post-modern dance, and more, concerning the multiplicity of identities, alternative narrative structures and referential systems, and so on. They have previously presented their works in spaces such as The Judson, The Glove, The Living Gallery, NYU Tisch Drama, La Mama, and UCCA.
Vyczie Dorado (pronounced vix-ie) is an installation and performance artist currently based in Manhattan, New York. Coming from her suburban home in Kissimmee Florida to the city, Vyczie is exploring themes of fractures in a military familial system. Coming from a military family background, she explores the concept of a home space and the repetition or recreation of one in each changing house environment. Running this parallel of mobility and fracture of a home image to create different home imitations is a perspective Vyczie is discussing outside of the military family echo-chamber. And though she focuses on military children’s moving experiences, interjections of queerness with the creation of family with friends is also kept in mind while creating each work.
Nicole Goodwin is the author of Warcries, as well as the 2018-2019 Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient, the 2018 Ragdale Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship Recipient, 2017 EMERGENYC Hemispheric Institute Fellow as well as the 2013- 2014 Queer Art Mentorship Queer Art Literary Fellow. She published the articles “Talking with My Daughter…” and “Why is this Happening in Your Life…” in the New York Times’ parentblog Motherlode. Additionally, her work ‘”Desert Flowers” was shortlisted and selected for performance by the Women’s Playwriting International Conference in Cape Town, South Africa
April vendetta (they/them) explores themes of control, labor, and sexual play through diy surveillance to relay the physicality and the resilience of the body.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council