Exhibitions

HUMAN RESOURCES LOS ANGELES Human Resources Los Angeles presents Nothing lower than I, a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Xandra Ibarra. The exhibition is anchored in an archival exploration and artistic study of Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose’s canonical performances experimenting with sadism, masochism, pleasure, illness and disability in 1980s and 90s Los Angeles. Playing with sub mythologies and objects, Ibarra considers the relationship between care and pain, art and labor, sculpture and flesh. Her sculptures—steel pasties, bruised leather hammers, and wheelchairs—contend with the interplay of consent, race, and disability. Engaging historical and ongoing attachments, she invokes archival ghosts to think through ideas of bottomhood and dehumanization. The exhibition is curated by Jeanne Vaccaro in a collaboration between HRLA and the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based performance artist and community organizer from the U.S./Mexico border region of El Paso/Juárez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racial, gender, and queer subjectivities. Her art has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Bogotá), The Broad (Los Angeles), ExTeresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), the Leslie-Lohman Museum (New York City), and the Anderson Collection (Stanford). Ibarra’s work is located within feminist, immigrant, anti-rape, and prison abolitionist movements. Image credit: Joshua Schaedel

ONE ARCHIVES AT USC LIBRARIES, LOS ANGELES In 1975, French philosopher Michel Foucault went on an acid trip at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, California. Foucault’s trip and the effects it may have had on his theorization of sexuality have become contested intellectual history. Until recently, the only narrator of this experience was Simeon Wade, an out gay writer, musician, and history professor, who accompanied Foucault to the desert. A target of homophobia that sought to discredit him as an eccentric hippie, Wade’s position in the academy was vulnerable. In 1976, Wade produced a workbook, Chez Foucault, including original translations of the philosopher’s French lectures and interviews. This represents Wade’s remarkable commitment to pedagogy and a significant instance of the early reception and circulation of Foucault’s work in the US. Photographs, correspondence, and ephemera exhibited here, recently discovered in an Oxnard, California storage unit and acquired by the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, attest to the credibility of Wade’s account and evidence something—but the question is, what? Foucault on Acid takes the mythology surrounding Foucault’s California trip as a prompt to interrogate the desires we attach to history and place. Moving away from Foucault’s biography to think through his history of sexuality, this exhibition re-enters the desert scene to understand the way subjects are formed in space and time. As compelling as fantasy as it is as history, Foucault’s acid trip is engaged here to animate a set of relationships across psychedelia, ecology, the university, precarious labor conditions, and minoritarian knowledge. Responding to Foucault’s desert archive, the exhibition presents paintings and objects by New Mexico based artist Grace Rosario Perkins. Her punk ethos and creative practice are shaped by her movement between city centers, the Navajo Nation, and the Gila River Indian Community. As an artist, storyteller, and teacher, Perkins is interested in disassembling her personal narrative and reassembling it as one that layers words, objects, signifiers, and symbolic color. Her maximalist canvases often collage and embed text into the painted surface, generating a psychedelic topography built from cultural dissonance, language, history, and autobiography. Through this matrix, Perkins brings attention to mutual aid and Indigenous centered organizing, asking, who gets to imagine the desert expanse as synonymous with freedom? From borders policed and patrolled to anti-immigrant culture wars, the desert is marked by constraint and containment mechanisms, even while it is often figured in the white colonial imaginary as open and empty—a Foucauldian lesson, to be sure. The exhibition invites exploration of how archival and desert imaginaries inform the interaction of sex and race. Across different historical junctures, the works presented here interrogate the spatial coordinates of power and fantasy and the desert expanse as a space of unfreedom and possibility.

ROOT DIVISION, SAN FRANCISCO Reading Room: The Feminist Art of Self Help is a group exhibition that explores the work of artists who critique gender essentialism of feminism from within and outside its movements. Rooted in the tradition of experimental and intersectional feminist arts, exhibiting artists create new visual language and interventions in response to current and urgent political formations. By taking refuge in architectural and emotional interiors, these artworks collectively propose radical feminist aesthetics. To spend time in a “reading room” implies an investment in returning to foundational histories; a willingness to revise prior positions, as well an openness to new information. This act is a form of self-study that has the capacity to transform artistic practices into collective political action. Reading Room exhibiting artists not only call for political action, but also the creation of artistic spaces as forms of self-care. This desire to undermine the binary of private and public space comes from an awareness of the inescapability of their own bodies that are legislated, hold trauma, and reproduce social, political, and biological histories. Reading Room addresses the desire to revisit and put to use feminism in its full and sometimes messiest iterations of hope and desire. Artists: Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, The Canaries (Jesse Cohen & Taraneh Fazeli), Christen Clifford, Ricki Dwyer, Nicki Green, Linda Montano, Laura Parnes, Grace Rosario Perkins,Allison Smith, Julie Tolentino and Abigail Severance, Stephanie Young, The Museum of Woman (Mikki Yamashiro and Machine Mclaughlin)

COOPER UNION SCHOOL OF ART, NEW YORKGLASS CURTAIN GALLERY, CHICAGOCANTOR FITZGERALD GALLERY, PHILADELPHIA Bring Your Own Body, co-organized with Stamatina Gregory, presents the work of transgender artists and archives, from the institutional to the personal. Taking its title from an unpublished manuscript by intersex pioneer Lynn Harris, the exhibit historicizes the sexological and cultural imaginary of transgender through a curatorial exploration of the Kinsey Archives. Simultaneously it presents contemporary transgender art and world making practices that contest existing archival narratives and construct new historical genealogies. While the exhibition gathers work under an expanded umbrella of transgender, it does so without identitarian claims. Moving beyond the aesthetically defunct category of “identity politics” and the fraught gains of visibility, the artworks propose transgender as a set of aesthetics made manifest through multiple forms: paint, sculpture, textiles, film, digital collage, and performance. Artists: Niv Acosta, Mark Aguhar, Math Bass, Effy Beth, Justin Vivian Bond, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, Vaginal Davis, Zackary Drucker, Chloe Dzubilo, Juliana Huxtable, Greer Lankton, Pierre Molinier, Genesis P. Orridge, Flawless Sabrina, Buzz Slutzky, and Chris Vargas and the Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art. Public Programs In DISCOTROPIC | Alien Talk Show (2015) niv Acosta seizes on an elementary medium of transgender exposure—television and the confessional culture of the talk show—to explore the relationships between science fiction, disco, astrophysics, and the black American experience. The Queen (1968) follows a cross-country drag competition organized by Flawless Sabrina that concludes in the Miss All-America Camp Beauty Pageant at Town Hall in 1967. Flawless speaks with Zackary Drucker and Diana Tourjee about The Queen and the collaborative process of cataloguing the Flawless Sabrina Archive. Reading by Juliana Huxtable—poet, artist, and DJ. Juliana’s work explores the fragmented, mutating and mutable nature of identity, utilizing race, gender, and queerness as mediums to explore the possibilities of a post-identity politics. She uses a range of outlets to unpack these themes including self-portraiture, text, performance, nightlife, music, and poetry. Salon: Printed Matter is a pop-up salon with Amos Mac, photographer, writer, and co-founder of Original Plumbing, and curator Jeanne Vaccaro. The BYOB library contains Transvestia (1960-1980) by pioneer Virginia Prince, ephemera belonging to The Transsexual Menace, and newsletters like The Society for the Second Self, all examples of transgender organizing and community formation in the pre-digital era. TransEuphoria revisits the artistic legacy of Chloe Duzbilo (1960-2011) —downtown performer, activist, and singer in the rock band Transisters. As part of activist organizations like the Transsexual Menace Chloe directed one of the first federally funded HIV prevention programs for transgender sex workers in 1997. With Justin Vivian Bond, T De Long, Jeffrey Greene, and Buzz Slutzky; in partnership with Visual AIDS. Happy Birthday, Marsha! is an experimental film about the legendary transgender artist and activist Marsha “Pay it No Mind” Johnson and her life in the hours before the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York City. Directors Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel stage a performative lecture and screening. catalog: why have there been no great transgender artists?

HUMAN RESOURCES LOS ANGELES SCREENING OF TOUR WITHOUT END (92 min.) AND LIVE PERFORMANCES BY RACHEL MASON AND BRONTEZ PURNELL AND CONVERSATION WITH CHRIS KRAUS AND LAURA PARNES Human Resources is pleased to present Tour Without End (2014-2019), a multi-platform installation by filmmaker Laura Parnes, organized by Jeanne Vaccaro. Tour Without End casts real-life musicians, artists and actors as bands on tour, and expands into a cross-generational, Trump–era commentary on contemporary culture and politics. It features members of Gang Gang Dance, LeTigre, The Julie Ruin, MEN, Eartheater, MGMT, Light Asylum, and more. Shot in real environments and situations, the core group of players improvised based on semi-scripted scenes. Because many of these performers are legends themselves in the New York City downtown scene, they are archetypes playing archetypes.  The work revels in the sometimes hilarious — but always complex — band dynamics that the characters endure while touring, collaborating, and aging in a youth-driven music industry. As the players move in and out of character, blending fiction and real life, the film moves in and out of non-linear narrative and historical document.  Shot from 2014–2018 at over 15 DIY music spaces in and around New York City — many of which have since shuttered their doors — the film acts as an urgent time capsule for the rapidly gentrifying city.  The installation version highlights the extensive and growing archive of live performance in NYC shot during the four-year production schedule and the raw footage from the improvised scenes. These include more than thirty musicians and ten underground music venues. The archive expands as the project is shown.