Clay Cosmos. Photo by Carla Escareno. Courtesy Candi X.
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*Advance tickets for this program are sold out. An in-person wait list will open at 7:00 P.M.
Pleasure ceremonialist and dreamer cy x curates OPEN STUDIOS like they would Love Island, inviting freaky, intimate, and captivating work from friends they have work-crushes on. Emerging from their desire to support their friend’s traveling show where she fucks a flower in full eco-erotic fashion, cy invites friends and crushes Avatar Lilith, Coco Villa, and Candi X to share their work and practice in budding stages.
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
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PROGRAM
Avatar Lilith: INTRAFACE 001
INTRAFACE 001 is a work in progress exploring the transitional space between membranes – where one ends and another begins. Existing as a bodily extension of Avatar Lilith, and as a flesh and sinewed tethering point, INTRAFACE 001 is a hybrid instrument that produces sonic fragments created algorithmically through Artificial Intelligence, trained off of her digital DNA, creating a type of intimacy between Avatar, meat body, and interface. By giving this algorithmic alien-other a fetish body and presence, Avatar Lilith reimagines and reframes our relationship to intangible and incoherent technocratic byproducts and systems that are inherently obscured and designed for flattening and optimizing. INTRAFACE 001 explores the power dynamic between these entities by creating a physical encasement (INTRA-/inside, rather than INTER-/between), encircling, entrapping, and perhaps un-flattening.
Coco Villa: I Am Swimming With Zaza
I Am Swimming With Zaza is an ongoing intimacy between fact and the fantastical, real and imagined. As they circulate, slow-moving sculptural gestures and rhythmic shapes become more intertwined superseding juxtapositions of you and me, then and now, and here and there. What can I do to honor you, now that it is too late? The You, and you that I come from, and the You that occasionally stands in for me.
Performed by Benin Gardner and Coco Villa
Sound Mix by Taul Katz, featuring Las Nalgas de Venus by Quixosis, DIZZY PPL BECOME BLURRY by Saya Gray, and Macorina by Chavez’s Vargas
Candi X: R.I.P. ROSY
A bright and playful piece about aliveness, love, death, and celebration, R.I.P. ROSY follows the intimate romance between Clay and Rosy (man and flower) as their bond transforms with joy even as their physical forms change. Following clear instructions left by Rosy for her commemoration party, we are asked to get silly and deeply curious about what it means to be alive. Drawing from erotic ecology philosophies, our life/death/life cycles are invited into reflection. How may we use celebration as a way to confront grief and bring ourselves into action in these times when our aliveness is needed most?
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Avatar Lilith is a multi-hyphenate artist that masquerades as an avatar using computer graphics, sound design, installations, and audiovisual performance. They seek to reject linearity and binary logic systems by existing in two or more places at once. Avatar Lilith hopes to encourage others to embrace playfulness, curiosity, and creativity by worldbuilding and embracing alternative logic systems and technologies as a critical practice through performance, installations, and research. Their work has been featured internationally in galleries and venues such as Acud Galerie (Berlin), Nunu Gallery (NYC), Basement (CPH), Stonewall Inn (NYC), and Ars Electronica (AUT).
Candi X is a performance and video artist, experience facilitator, producer, and director originally from the US currently based in Mexico City. Her work reflects deep research around the eco-erotic relationship between the human and natural world and expresses through brightly queer and colorful outputs. All of her works are equal parts accessible, embodied, intellectual, and silly – redefining the erotic by focusing on igniting the sensorial imagination. Through playful, body based experiences, performances, films, and practices she facilitates fun, connection, and curiosity that opens audiences up to new perspectives.
Coco Villa is a Jamaican-Colombian-American dancer, interdisciplinary artist and educator from Queens, currently living in Brooklyn. Tightly bound to identity, Villa leads an interdisciplinary art-research practice investigating relations between body, object, and landscape. Their work spans across disciplines of performance, fashion design, installation, photography, and film. They utilize material and movement languages to tell autobiographical stories, explore human intimacy, and build familial archives. Driven by historical and scientific discovery, Villa thrives in the ocean, in the woods, in the dance studio, darkroom, design lab, and library, playfully creating by hand.
cy x is a demon and a dreamer moved by tremendous desire and obsession with glory holes, sex cinemas, erotic horror, queer archives, and money. They study the way that erotics and space co-construct each other and the objects produced from such encounters and utilize their findings to create ritualized ephemera in the form of writing, sound, video, and performance. Their work has been shown in the Center for Art Research and Alliances, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Culture Hub, Pioneer Works, Rewire Festival, and other spaces, both digital and physical.