 Hi, I think we're going to get started. My name is Rachel Cook. I'm the curator at DiverseWorks, and this is the slide jam. So, here's how it works. You're going to hear from 11 different artists, both visual and performing. Some are in Austin, some are new to NPN, and some are NPN artists that you might be familiar with. We're going to do it. Each of them is showing a combination of either video clips or still images about projects that they're currently working on. And our idea is that everyone has five minutes, we'll have a little art first in between, and then we will have a conversation, and you guys are a welcome audience to ask questions to the artists. I selected this group of artists because I know it will be one of their practices, and I think that they kind of represent a wide range of practices across the country right now. And I try to include some Austin artists that I think people here in this room might not be familiar with. So, join me in welcoming the first viewer of the list. Oh, sorry, I don't have control of it. Well, yeah, let's do a round of applause to all the artists, and then we'll begin. So, Dan as you know is best expressed in video form, so I'll initiate a video sample first, and then I'm going to chat about it a little bit. I think, you know, we're in versus, but what I would like to do is hit pause on the video. The first video is a sample from a piece called Matching Drapes, and so we're going to show that beginning, and then I think it's about a minute and a half, so we'll hit pause and it kind of shifts to a new video. Okay, so I'll just talk about this a little bit as we're sort of creating the navigate. So, that piece is called Matching Drapes. It was a collaboration with a visual artist in Minneapolis named Terence Payne, and Terence Payne really works to create portraits that use a lot of patterns, that sort of represent kind of characteristics, and one of the things that our works have in common is that we've got these sort of subversive embedded messaging that's sort of disrupting these sort of Victorian... I'll finish this thought. Victorian kind of person... It's the notions of formal versus the vernacular, and so those felt like a good, happy marriage in this piece, and I'll talk about that more in a minute. So be mindful of the five minutes. I'm going to just let the video play out. I really see dance as a form of language that has its own set of rules and logic that creates sort of a space, a world that has different rules than traditional narrative structures like cinema, et cetera. It has its own... That form creates opportunities. The last piece that we witnessed was a piece about striptease. It was a piece shared from the Lockhart Center. It was also presented in a fuse box. It was at the Selvidge Bankard Theater here, as well as the Lockhart Center. It's a mother touring dates as well. And that was about shared space in the generative process for kind of finding common language. So interested in pattern and repetition and finding where those overlaps of expression and creativity exist. The visual artist for that piece was Jennifer Davis, and then the composer for the second was involved in that. Thanks so much, my five minutes are up. I'm Sterling Allen. I live here in Austin. I'm a visual artist working in photography and sculpture, among other things. So I wanted to start with a couple works that led up to a project that I'm going to spend most of the time on. These are small on scale, probably 16, 18 inches high. And I was thinking of them as kind of maquettes for something room-sized, a partition. And then having some of the shadows and things being implied with color as opposed to light. And sort of thinking about that in relationships with photography and the way in which light is sort of applied to an object and freezes it in time and creates a specific condition. So like on that one, the large shadow you see is painted in. So I got really interested in that and sort of the position of these things may have held at one point that created the shadow and then you give it full light and then that condition is kind of gone. So you go to the next one. So these are a few works that will be in this project coming up. That I made based on that where I sort of left the idea of these partitions and worked with these simple kind of crew two by four forms. And so along them it's difficult to sort of tell they're works that are really hard to photograph which is like a really annoying thing, hard to say a lot. But it's true in the sense that the light on the sculptures in paint obeys the sort of condition that they're in. So the top planes of them you go to the next slide. The top, you can see this one's in progress. So that left side is actually being tinted with paint and the two blocks that are coming out of the middle the top one is painted. The bottom one is just the same color as everything else. So when they're completed they obey the conditions that they would normally be in. Thus it's difficult to discern unless you're walking around it whether it's just a blue, all the same color blue and the lights hitting it or whether I think I'm through and kind of up the contrast basically. So you go to the next one. So this project was at a place called Saladiers in San Antonio it's a domestic space quite small and about 90 minutes from here. So you go to the next slide. So I had the idea that I wanted to use this space as kind of a laboratory and workspace as well and not just bring objects in and put them on the walls on the floor. So I started by buying some stuff in San Antonio at thrift stores and just moving it around the space and go to the next slide. This was a bench for the city outside that I blocked the door with and on the right side are all the shelves and kind of pedestal support material that the gallery has had historically. So I dragged those out of the closet and I made images with my camera on my first trip. So I drove down there and I spent the night in the space woke up the next day and worked in the space for prior six hours with these thrift store objects kind of just as a way to begin this problem of what I was going to use. These are some objects from my studio that I brought in and I started making photographs of them in the space. So that's a bench for the next one. That's an image of the same pieces where I've changed the position of the camera and at the bottom you can see this like lasso rope that I bought from thrift stores. So I made a lot of images with the camera came back to Austin brought some of the images back but it works back to my studio including so the 2x force culture I made in the studio it came home. The yellow sheet I bought at the thrift store put it in the space made images with it and brought it back and so I started photographing the works in my studio again now with the sort of detritus and the sort of memory of what was at Solidity is. So this is actually a photograph that I made in my studio and printed you go to the next slide and took back to Solidity as a second time so I drove back through the night again and on the right you can see that photograph on the wall and then in the middle you can see the works themselves and on the left you can see a similar situation the photograph sort of evidence or documentation and then this is the next slide where I made photographs of those photographs so now it's like this doubling effect so this is the first actual work that was included in the final presentation it's a photograph so go to the next one this is the second actual work that would be in the show so it's a photograph of the photograph of the photograph into the wall that contains an image and an object from a previous encounter of the space go ahead and this is an image, an installation image so you can see now it's a framed photograph in the space some of the original objects that I was toying with made their way as well go to the next one and that's another install image so what was bad about this is that it was an apartment store to the gallery it had a fire the night after the opening so the work was up for the opening and then shut down you go to the next slide what was actually wonderful about it was that ArtPace, which is in San Antonio has a residency program one of their artists let me bring the work to ArtPace and so I reinstalled it and brought with it you go to the next slide sort of the memories of the solidiest space totally decontextualized so these images were made specifically for that domestic space they contain images of the domestic space they made no sense in this exhibition space now but it was like the challenge of trying to re-contextualize all this work that had its home somewhere else and its genesis somewhere into a completely new environment and this again was up for like two hours so it was like all this kind of back and forth and driving and building and printing and re-photographing for these two two-hour events which I felt actually really wonderful about as opposed to putting up an exhibition and letting it die for six weeks or not having to change there was so much energy behind these two projects these two sort of one-night events yeah, that's where they came out so, thank you so I wanted to start with the context for my work as a dance maker and that's the work I do through the nonprofit that I founded which is freshly produced those three years and days you can meet that underneath so when I moved to San Francisco 16 years ago so literally nobody was putting transgender and gender non-performing artists on stage we were generally related to performing bars or the chorus of cafes with like espresso machines going up, right, and the chorus of me and like so many of my trans ancestors and elders it was totally unthinkable that we would ever be supported for our art or invited to the table that was the one situated next to the espresso machine so in 2002 I brought together a group of fellow trans and queer artists and activists and put on what we thought would be this one-time festival of trans and queer performance, the Freshman Festival long story short, 15 years later we have become a thriving and inside nonprofit organization who create and present new random trans art programs our 15th anniversary or the last 15 years we supported over 500 trans and queer artists over two-thirds of them were people of color and over two-thirds were trans and gender non-performing so I'm saying this because if you are a trans or queer artist or no folks please talk to me I want to know about you so next slide oh that was not the right slide the first slide now that I just looked back but that's okay, that was my email signature that's okay so let's go back one slide so over the last six years I've created a trilogy of evening legumes that reveal aspects of buried or censored or forgotten aspects of transgender and queer history this is the third in the trilogy in my new work which is The Missing Generation it's now on a two-and-a-half, three-year 20-city tour and it's available for booking still Missing Generation gives voice to transgender and LGBTQ long-time survivors at their early age epidemic and I created the work first by traveling across the U.S. and recording all of these two interviews with trans and queer long-time survivors at their early age epidemic so the next slide so this is I just actually most of my slides are full of serious survivors because of the project we're just going through A.S. Jones in D.C. let's go through these if I say age name next is Cheryl Courtney-Evans in Atlanta who is an amazing trans woman activist who just passed away on the last couple of months who have been living with HIV for over 30 years next slide is the amazing D.D. Chamblain in Atlanta next slide, Jo Ezo from D.C. next slide, Patricia Jones from Long Island who estimates she lost about a thousand people during the early epidemic she worked with directly next slide, Kate Mordstein, the amazing trans activist next slide, Jevon Egypt from New York next slide, Ron Swanda from D.C. who has been living with HIV for over 30 years and next slide, Joseph Minor Hill from Boston who has been living with HIV since he was diagnosed in 1984 when he was 14 years old next slide so I did not set out to record 75 hours of world history videos but I did and then came home and spent over five hundred hours integrating people's voices into a 17 section score I'm going to spend the last few years working with my dancers I also want to give a shout out because this work was great with a very serious support investment by a coalition of presenters in the Indian Pan family with support by the National Dance Project NAA Waste Dance Festival Dance Place theater that says seven stages in the queer cultural center they should let the video click I don't know if you can turn it off and turn it off I'm just chatting for a little while so internet is awaiting but some of the images I'll show after the video is my own practice as a trans and queer activist and artist is to make work into relationship with communities and then to perform and to do the work and do the relationship with communities so as we tour I work in a camp to be a presenter or theater I work with community partners to be able to local trans people I'm sure many of us think I certainly know I have for trans people I've never felt safe enough to sit foot in a dance workshop gym or do a studio so these are some images that I can use to do that's okay folks my my response to the fries now last minute I already have these workshops thank you so much I'm Bayley Liu I'm an installation artist and I didn't get a note that we need to be talking about our current work so I shared a few previous projects we've been over we can start on this one if we want so Rachel if you don't mind let's go back two slides actually one forward okay let's start from here typically I work with large scale material process driven installations so this is a project it was in 2006 and this is a barn I have a recycler for me on Churrosa foundation artist residency a lot of my work looks at looks at specific spaces and in a way I respond to it so when I saw the barn I thought I must make something into space it's from 1800s that's forward once in life and this is a project I made the material you see here is pure paraffin wax and as you know this is an extremely brutal material and I came up with a process in my studio for the next slide to stretch molten paraffin wax in water into long strips before I arrived at the residency I wasn't sure what to do with this experiment but when I saw the barn this idea of this elusive image of a house which refers to a home comes to mind so I created these strips next slide please to suspend in space to create this hovering image of a house so here you can see that's where the full wax was contacting the water and it goes all the way down to a fine point as I lifted up the water next slide please so the fragility of the material speaks very much of the intent of the work when you enter into space people tend to slow down when they talk wider it's something that you cannot touch because the material is shared in your hand you can buy some light touch next slide please next slide so I included a couple images of the installation for you to see the material and the fragility of the material next slide please so the next project I'd like to share with you is demanding project I don't typically do performance projects but this is one of the exceptions this was from 2011 was on view at a women's work gallery here in Austin I suspended 50 pairs of Chinese scissors these are IM scissors they're quite sharp they are not polite like the kind of scissors we use so I borrow a lot from my culture background I grew up in China I also look at a culture tradition of Chinese culture to get ideas and inspirations from my work however as an artist my concern is more universal but those things that's shared by different people that's often overlooked so the suspended scissors create this intense menacing very harsh energy above and I want to sit under and sew the next slide this was a time where there was the world financial crisis there was a lot of worries and concerns I was also looking at how we approach dating life there's always all these uncertainties, stress worry as a young parent I also realize how it is our children there's this endless fear for everything so in a way I'm looking at how do I dress in life the next one the issue is large or small and how we may respond or counter to something small, simple and persistent so I thought the idea of sewing is such a familiar comforting action but it is also an action of healing so that persistence perhaps could bring things could bring about change as I stitch these fabric together a string that didn't have before so they start to create these peaks and valleys that you see in the last slide to create a topography as they slowly expand in space they counter that energy above resulting from the simple action so at the entrance of the gallery I come on a large sheet of white fabric I invite the viewers to cut a small section to be passed on to me to be sewn onto the large field on the ground therefore the viewers thinking thoughts their energy is passed on into the work so next slide during the opening I really enjoyed in the way because this is the first time I don't have to talk to anyone so let's continue on and the next project I want to show again this also took place in Austin from Austin and I we remember this project it's entitled first it's a large scale collaborative project organized by women in the work gallery it was supported by a Robin Rushenberg combination artistic collaboration grant and I collaborate with three other women two architects Emily Lildo and Norma Yancey and the landscape architect Cassie Bergstrom so we cited this project in the heart of Austin which is the Lady Bird Lake and we're looking at the issue of drought since 2011 the mountain year drought killed over 300 million trees it's such a tremendous amount of number it's impossible to even grasp or understand so I decided to work with an image of one icon and tree that's affected by the drought and the funny story was that tree we have to use a dying tree for the structure integrity let's go to the next one the reason we chose Lady Bird Lake is also because it's a constant water level lake there's such a privilege for us in Austin to have this lake where we have this constant water level and downstream there's nothing in their riverbeds and I think it's also a place because of that with our beautiful green belt we realized we were actually in drought during the time we were working on this project we were staying in drought and it was a project of the lifetime really we got to work with cranes as you saw in the last one which is surgery on the tree so we embedded this very long metal pole into the tree we painted it white using ecologically, say, paint let's go to the next slide and when I'm a barge went down the river this was a really wonderful time where we held the tree all the way to the site and we drilled a pipe into the bedrock of the lake for like 20 feet so that's a part that we don't see and then we also got to work with the 18-way layer to transport the tree so that was fantastic let's keep going so the tree grew up for about three months because I usually work in my studio with my hands this is also the one opportunity for me to stand back to really realize such a huge effort from the team and work with everyone else to let go of control in a way so at night time the tree was illuminated to like 10-45pm so that the lights turned off, the birds were asleep and then during our drought after the tree was up there was a flood some people are nodding and remembering and the entire team couldn't sleep over it and then we were like oh my god we hope the tree will stand as you can see how high the water came up if you are familiar with the site and the tree stood so do you want to load the video while I start to talk now I just get it all I'm Rosie Seamus I'll be your shouni on a duaga and up here and talk about my work I don't think that that's actually going to be possible so we'll say are you going to play the video? ok what I'd like to say is that my whole being is a protest and then I exist against all odds I'm a dance maker but it's only a small part of what I actually do in this world I have been working in the arts for 35 years I'm also a teacher sometimes I curate I'm an organiser and advocate but mostly I'm a radical native feminist I come from a very long line of diplomats fifth grade grandfather was a diplomat who negotiated with George Washington and because of that I spent part of every single day calling out inequity, racism in a multitude of ways so my work embodies this in every way that it possibly can so I want to share with you first a video clip from a piece that just toured yes no this project Skins I will talk about this a little bit because it just opened the last piece I toured in the U.S. and Canada from 2014 to 2016 to black boxes and museums and large institutions this piece Skins is sort of also a response to that and I very particularly decided that I wanted to work with organizations that already had a relationship to the community to some degree so it is a film it's an exhibit and it is a dance which is actually just my personal expression of skin the whole project really is to give visibility to the diversity of how many people identify in the United States we are over 567 recognized tribes many of us do live in urban areas and so there is this whole inter-tribal cultural communities that have grown out of forestry location which began 70 years ago and so I wanted to show this diversity in many ways and so really creating a dance piece about this is absolutely ridiculous I have to say I would do that and I would have to have a minimum of 567 people in the work in order to even begin to describe the diversity of human identity so what we did is created an exhibit and this exhibit will be in different places so the three main areas that I am focused on are the Twin Cities in Minnesota, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay Area so we opened Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis and we took a small group to Riverside, California to be in Indigenous contemporary dance symposium and next we will be at Virginia and Berkeley and we will be at East Side Arts in Oakland we will be working with the Chicago Cultural Center which is an English program as well we will be at the American Indian Community Housing Organization so this is quite a different tour than the one before part of that is that I make my work for Native people I don't make my work for other people but it doesn't mean that everybody is not invited where's my time? I don't know what time we have less than one minute so that seems to turn off a lot of people but what I am trying to do is create an authentic connection between me and the community and other people so rather than non-native people coming to my work and having a voyeuristic experience wanting to have a Native experience which in a way they are having but they are doing it by watching me communicate to my own people just a small video for instance I'll say one more little quick so we are all visitors on unceded Native American territory right? so if you want to make a difference what you can do is you can curate you can fund you can see and you can learn about Native artists in your community thank you hello everyone my name is Turko anymore I'm an artist based here in Austin I'm going to show three different bodies of work I work in a lot of different ways I kind of let the idea guide me so I don't really have specific mediums that I work in but I draw a lot from my cultural heritage and I'm also interested in Asian and indigenous traditions and collective memory this body of work is kind of about my relationship to my next cultural heritage it's a bit hard to see in this slide but it's a two dimensional work that there are images of Asian women that are mirrored and abstracted because of that mirroring and then they are overlaid with a hand cut pattern that then further abstracts the image so it's sort of about this kind of bailing of my understanding of what it means to be of mixed heritage and my sort of distance but like deep feeling about with my culture they are made on a vellum so they're bit translucent the experience of looking at them at different times of day changes what part of the piece comes forward or recedes so because they are sorry can we go back because they're on a translucent surface they either show the pattern on top more or the image behind it more and they'll start to kind of change depending on what time of day you look at them also I was interested in the distance at which you see them so because they're kind of strange forms you approach it and you're not quite sure what it is you come closer and you start to see detail and then you might have to pick apart what the image will come so I wanted that sort of layered experience with the distance of beckoning the viewer in to kind of parallel my own experience with my own cultural heritage given that slide so this was part of a public art piece that I completed this year in 2016 I was part of a larger project that was called Drawing Lines and it was about a response to Austin's will change from that large representation to a geographic representation so it was divided into 10 different districts and the idea was that artists would be embedded within each district to kind of make a piece with the community and for the community so this was my contribution to that and it was called Wish Lantern Bridge and I went into the community and worked with schools community centers and I made origami lanterns with them each person and I asked each person to write a wish of their own on each piece of paper before we folded it and then when we folded it and blew the wishing together it was kind of this tangible wish and then I struck sorry a little faster and then I I asked the community come together to do a ceremony and then we lit the bridge together so it was this one large collective wish and we did like a walking meditation to kind of think about all of our wishes and the last piece I wanted to show was Kovogar Earth that's up right now to benefit the Austin Animal Center and it's made of 1800 of the Japanese Lucky Cats and each meant to represent one tenth of the 18,000 animals the shelter serves per year and each one is available for adoption and all of those funds go directly to the center to benefit their adoption so so but to introduce our next artist please welcome Neil Barclay from the Kovogar Earth Center of New Orleans so you all don't go back to this church K. Pearl is the our next artwork's artist we had the pleasure of working with Katie on an interdisciplinary we should say over here we're called How to Build a Forest and How to Build a Forest actually takes place over eight hours it's an installation during a durational installation piece where the artists literally Sean Haugh Katie and Lisa D'Amour actually build a forest in our raw warehouse space and then destroy it by the end of the eight hour circuit so Katie is one half of that performance team of Pearl D'Amour it's an interdisciplinary company she shares with Playwright Lisa D'Amour apart from Pearl D'Amour she makes her own individual work as a playwright, director and performer and today she's going to show us liver of a work a show in development called Okay, Okay there's an exclamation point after the second okay an intimate performance of optics about looking for home by putting down roots in a home state you were raised to reject by the way she is looking for homes to workshop the next draft of this piece you can check out our new brand new website liberal.com and learn what to think it's a conservative state in a sometimes called NPN conference was there in Tulsa the town where I grew up my family moved there when I was a baby my Jewish liberal hyper-intellectual from Detroit, Michigan family moved there in 1971 for my father's teaching dog and living there in Oklahoma bread in my mother a particular combination of panic hysteria depression and rage turning her into our own family's dragon complete with fire and a chain around her neck that kept her tethered unfortunately to Oklahoma Carrie Underwood is from Oklahoma she is a singing superstar sensation and Tonya Harding that ice skater the other ice skater I think she is from Oklahoma I could be wrong but we are not from Oklahoma we are not allowed to pronounce Tulsa, Telsa or milk milk and the dragon that was my mother continued to breathe fire at whoever was unfortunate enough to cross her path at the wrong time for example any night after 8 p.m so it is night it's another night my sister is watching the match reruns in the TV room and I again I am still 10 years with practically the only white girl with black hair in my entire school practicing every white girl in Oklahoma is blonde but me and my hairy legs are not blonde there is a razor in my just water I test it too much the change is too overwhelmingly beautiful I picture myself walking into the cafeteria with shaved arms I don't want anyone to know that I shaved I just want to show up beautiful as beautiful as them I stick to my legs I do a good job I go to bed this is the legendary class where she tells her students that no one really knows what Jesus said not really one girl raises her hand and says in your church you know what Jesus said and the girl says because in my church what Jesus said is printed in red my mom gets her head taken a bath earlier that night my sister said no I shaved so wet in the hallway the hallway light makes a halo I freeze in my bed I try to get smaller Katie the driver said I know you're awake I think she will not shave your legs do you shave your legs I am not getting smaller I am getting bigger I am a big, chunky, lying mass of girl more than I am hiding with channels of steam coming from the dragon's nostrils are you telling me that if I were to turn on this light and walk over to that bed and pull down through the covers I would see that you had not shaved your legs tonight fire shoots out in the worst storms of the 1930s of the Oklahoma Panhandles the sky would go dark in the middle of the day totally dark midnight at noon black wizards people would lose their way at three o'clock in the afternoon get lost just between their fences and their front doors I've lived here for about 15 years I'm a theater artist and I'm going to tell you a little bit about my work as a performer as well as my work as a director and my ensemble company called generic ensemble company oh it's backwards but that's okay so can we go to the end and then move back where's Rachel can we go to the end and move back yeah okay great so we're going to go backwards because we're so clear so I have a company called generic ensemble company which we call Genenko because we're so clear and we make the invisible visible through bold socially relevant body center theater which is a fancy way of saying that we center queer people of color queer women of color in the context of Texas in the south which has been a challenging project and I'm so proud to say it's going to be even more challenging and can't wait so we focus on mostly device theater and a lot of our work training is a very specific thing that people can come by and queer people of color getting trained in certain media is very difficult so a big part of what we do is to focus on community based community driven work and to train each other to become as effective and as moving as we possibly can be which is, you know, lovely and also a challenge so we tend to focus on work that tells our stories on top of canonical ideas so for example this was our first work called stuck on GDOT and it was inspired by waiting for Godot and don't tell the back of the state to assume me but we do have the bowler hats and it is the color next slide this is a piece that I did about cancer my mother passed away from cancer I had two very good friends passed away from cancer and I collected objects that I did a call and collected objects that people had associated with cancer so that includes here one of those cheer up cancer bears that says God loves you on it which is great as well as a radiation mask that one of my friends used during her treatment which she had a brain tumor and so this was not necessarily based on telling but it was based on telling stories of healing as well as loss next slide please we also do some parapetetic work because I am trained in kind of music I like to do weird stuff let's go on to the next one this is a piece that we did that was based on the good person in step one it was also a roving piece and the question we were asking is how can I be good when everything is so expensive next slide please this is another internet next slide please and now we are getting into the more recent work so this is Robin Hood and Elegy which we produced a year and a half ago here in Austin and we produced it and we were looking at I'll just say that Black Lives Matter was something that was on everybody's mind and so we decided to take the myth of Robin Hood in order to look at how exactly Black Lives Matter and what would happen if Robin was a black person living today the next don't go to get sorry the next slide has trigger warning images of anti-black violence and so we used a combination of device work and history we told a lot of stories about anti-black violence in order to get at the root of just just seeing what was going on and realizing what was going on next slide our most recent work is called the Makata Reclaimed and we used the Makata which some of you might know Yellow Face Racist thing and we took an all Asian-American cast to tell a story about internment in the near future which at that point in time felt really far away but doesn't so much anymore next slide because I want to remind us that quite a lot of the US which enabled our state to incarcerate upwards of 100,000 Japanese-Americans is still considered good law so this is the last slide but our next I'll just talk about our next piece which will be a device piece called Shaharzad with the most Middle Easter and actually mostly untrained cast where we're going to look at anti-Muslim sentiment as well as displacement and violence and I just want to say that being in Texas and producing this work is hard but now I feel like we have the rest of the country to look towards because it's going to be hard for all of us and so I'm so honored and thank you so much for letting me talk about our work and I'm so honored to be able to present with everybody else. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for being here today my name is Liz Rada and I'm an interdisciplinary artist and based here in Austin, Texas getting into the first slide and essentially I work with found materials primarily video but also objects and my work is really about materials with meanings that are unintended by the original makers and so I kind of spend a lot of my time just looking for materials that mean spending hours and hours looking through YouTube videos or going for walks or finding materials on eBay and then it's really about sort of creating a relationship between the materials that I find I'm really interested in materials that are psychologically or culturally loaded and pairing materials that are sort of more complicated or asking questions whether or put in a relationship with one another so this first piece is called Advantage and essentially I made it a lot of a resident at a space in Miami and at the time I only had access to a bike and all I thought would be in terms of materials were like a stock of books and a camera so I only worked with things that I could either carry by walking and so someone had partially cut a palm tree in their front yard and so I ended up using that as a part of this piece and then I found a Wilson basketball in the residency if you can go to the next slide and the piece is called Advantage and I think you know it's a lot of my work is about tension I think it was Bertrand's side that said that there's tension in everything that's worthwhile and in this particular piece there's a subject of the work but also the materials are like they're sort of resting on one another and this sort of pipe that's going through the space also becomes a part of the work if you could go to the next slide and if you could pause this before this sound plays so this is actually a sound installation it was recently up at Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio and this piece is called Everybody's Got a Hungry Heart in American Skin and essentially it consists of several hours of content of people who have material found online of people who are rubbing their bodies with microphones and what's interesting what's kind of interesting is that it doesn't sound like it's something that a single person would produce it's very sort of celestial in nature so anyways it's compilation of people rubbing their bodies with microphones so if we could hear that just try to make this sound I can run my body actually kind of sound a little bit like that it's a little sexier though or you can check out my website www.loserada.com okay so the next piece so I do work primarily with video and a lot of what I'm doing is finding video and then getting audio from a disparate source and then creating some kind of attention between this disparate material so actually the next two video clips are going to be part of an a solo exhibition I have coming with women in their work and I know that some of you guys are here in late January and you guys are in Boston so this piece is called First Freedom and it's just in fact a short excerpt from it okay so that's just a short excerpt so I guess another thing to say about my practices I get a lot of material off of YouTube and I've really tried not to shy away from what first material brings me and when I am looking for a material that I'm going to work with I don't have any sort of agenda that I'm sort of consciously aware of I'm really looking for stuff that I'm drawn to and then it's about kind of figuring out what my relationship is to that material and commenting on it in some capacity and so this particular video I'm just going to show you again a short excerpt from it's called Zoom Test and it's the result of doing an online search of Zoom test videos where people test the Zoom function on their camera to see how robust and smooth and amazing their camera quality but this one was different and then I responded to it with a piece of audio as an audio translation of a text by the philosopher Judea Krishnamurti so if you want to play this in all our relationships each one of us builds an image about the other and these two images have relationship actual relationship between two human beings or between many human beings completely ends when there is the formation of images it seems to me that one of our greatest difficulties is to see for ourselves really clearly when we say we see a tree or a flower or a person do we actually see them or do we really see the image that the word has created so we're going to show two most recent projects from the last couple of years this is a project entitled Sightlines that was at Artbeason San Antonio and I think in a general way I'm interested in phenomenological aspects of sort of photographic language I'm seduced by photography and I'm also repelled by it this work was inspired by something a lot of time on in west Texas looking at the idiosyncratic qualities of light in color I was taking unfixed pieces of photographs and rolling them out in the landscape and watching basically the paper fade so the paper should have been used in a dark room but I was sort of doing the opposite and I got really interested you can go to the next one in the folds the marks on the hand the gestures and indentations from the landscape itself as another kind of index and quality to the picture I think you go to the next one and I think one of the things that I was learning about was these kind of image object questions with photographs specific in that there's an experience to the surface as much as there is to the pictorial I'm going to go to the next one so in the show I pair the sort of sweet photographs with these glass panels in a kind of sculptural installation that were reliant on the light in the space to transition them so they were ephemeral in effect in that the viewer could go at a certain time of day and could potentially see this artificial light reflecting this but as the gallery space filled with light sometimes it was omitted or erased because of the brightness whereas in the opposite corner that one would transition in color sometimes depending on the viewer's position and so I'm always interested in the ways that our body and the space of our body can re-contextualize our experience with a picture and so I thought about the glass panels as a live photograph or this kind of unfaced idea of a picture and then the third component of the project I also work in video was a video project called Tower of the Americas a lot of my research has to do with histories of observation and one of the things that I've been researching are observation towers and specifically ones that are linked to the World's Fair so San Antonio was part of the 1968 World's Fair and one of the things about these towers is this panoptical experience when you're looking over at the horizon line that is linked to the camera and so the video is an hour long and it's filmed from the rotating restaurant which many of these towers boast and so the focus is actually on the glass which felt imperative and also showed it dialectic with this relationship with the photograph the surface and the pictorial and it circled around 360 degrees so it was the full rotation of the the 360 degree architecture the last project is from last year and it's a project called local time and I went to Dubai to film from what's marketed as the tallest observation tower in the world and okay and so one of the things that I learned about this space was sort of similar in thinking about the physics of the glass the engineering and the design and how people could encounter the view and I was very invested in the reflections we'll do the next one and one of the things that happened that felt similar to west Texas actually was that there were these optical illusionistic experiences with the atmospheric color part of which had to do with these sandstorms which are very common there and also the heat index was about 125 degrees and so that with the glass and this very climate controlled interior created this doubling of the suns which I'm not sure if you can actually see in the slide but so there's a suite of images that I made where you're seeing two suns and that vantage mostly composed of me just moving around the last panel to experience that and that's it Kristen I'm going to talk about one project it's called dance with flamingos it's an augmented reality sculpture park that has undergone two different iterations one in Gainesville Florida and another at the Queens Museum of Flushing Meadows Corona Park former site of the 1964 World's Fair in New York City and it's a project in which I collaborated with over the two iterations 20 different artists I wrote a contextual framework for the show and then I helped reproduce their augmented the augmented aspect of their work and all the artists worked in some form of 3D in their very different generations of artists next slide to experience the exhibition the visitors would download an app to their phone and then it was a free augmented reality app and then tap on their screen while looking at a postcard of a flamingo that was on Garden State this was the way I was able to present it in Florida but in New York you can't really have garden stakes in the park or something terrible could happen so they're a little different in each place and in the exhibition the flamingo acts as an ambassador and concierge to the project both the consummate Shulman and the embattled victim of environmental neglect and habitat destruction it is the act of scanning the image of this paradox bird that launches the augmented reality exhibition and worth noting also is that in Florida there are images of flamingos everywhere and the bird has actually gone missing in the wild for over 100 years conservation efforts have meant that in the last couple of years there have been a few more wild flamingos returning to the Everglades however at this point in our global situation of industry the situation of flamingo is worse than ever and they have a very fragile habitat so this project is very much using the flamingo to launch into a larger conversation about culture and industry, social issues, climate change things like that drawing parallels between the phantom presence and we go to the next slide between the phantom presence of augmented reality and equally intangible notions of the future and this rapid progression of technological and environmental change I prompted each artist to create a virtual work envisioning the future of land art and land use and everybody was kind of able to approach it in their own way and write a description and people would interact with these augments and they would can you stop at that slide, thanks and then they would interact with them and sometimes share them over social media and stuff like that and I was interested in digital tools and their ability to create even physically impossible scenarios that weren't linked to budget restrictions and things and explore new realities ideas of new realities next slide I'll tell you a little bit about some of them this is Lopappenheimer's Florida Rushmore and it's a palatial sized mountain sculpture a virtual Florida adaptation of the presidential monument in South Dakota the bedrock for the monument consists of an upside down imprint of the devil's middle hopper sinkhole there's sinkholes that are kind of naturally occurring and also accelerated due to industry in Florida and so he sort of turned it into a melting polar ice an inverse of a sinkhole and a melting polar ice cap made out of a Colorado limestone so he's referencing a lot of these things about the local environment and creating this new monument I'm going to give you another next slide this is a map from the Queen's iteration where you just have this one image to scan there's a list of artists on the back side there's one thank you there are works within the museum and also all around the grounds next slide this is Alfredo Salazarcaro's piece called Father next slide this is Emily's Shadow of the Sinking and it depicts the cultural environmental degradation brought on by revenue organization in China over the past few decades next slide and this is Morishan Aliari's Dark Matter this piece is based on a series of combined sculptural objects put together to form humorous juxtapositions the objects chosen for this series are the objects of things that have been banned or taboo in around China Saudi Arabia and North Korea did religious and political reasons and I also put one a geo-located one for her to Tehran at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance next and I'll just show you a few images next there's another copy of this at NASA the artist suggested this is a former swamp they saw our own anime next and the last one that I'll tell you about is a piece by this is a piece by I don't have it here Tabitha Razir and it's a tribute to black women who have given their bodies to medical science in particular the hysterectomy and she's kind of created this monument to their bodies and there's another one that's geo-located at Central Park in front of a large sculpture it's a statue that is attributed to the father of gynecology who is notorious for using women's bodies in science in this way particularly black women's bodies so that's just the taste I'm going to have another Baptist Church moment and say good afternoon thank you my name is Crystal Chanel Truscott and my company Progress Theater is a Houston-based company that uses theater as anti-racism engagement we perform neo-spirituals which are acapella musicals that are descendants of negro-spirituals and a blend of black aesthetics from the blues jazz, R&B, soul spoken word, hip-hop, all that using a methodology that I call soul work which is created from African American performing traditions and aesthetics my work typically spans and straddles time to place history in conversation with its systemic, cultural and social descendants the piece we are currently touring and that is still open for bookings is called The Burnin it's a project funded by the NMP Creation Fund grant co-commissioned by Junebug Productions and the Nifa National Theater Project grant The Burnin simultaneously examines two nightclub fliers one in 1940's Mississippi the other in 2000's in Chicago both of them among the top nightclub tragedies in U.S. history while researching The Burnin in Mississippi it became necessary to engage the early days of plantation tourism in order to contextualize the story of the over 300 African Americans who perished in the 1940's father when my company got the opportunity to rehearse on the grounds of a plantation in Mississippi I knew that my next piece was being born it's called Plantation Remix the idea for Plantation Remix began with the question what is an appropriate afterlife for America's historic slavery plantation at the time I was a professor at Prairie View A&M University a former plantation that was converted in 1867 to a historically black college that still thrives today but the majority of retired plantations cannot boast such a reincarnation many plantations became and remain prisons in their next lives Angola State Prison one of the most notorious plantation to prison potpines other sites like Monticello are preserved as historic monuments others are sites of romanticized reenactments of antebellum glory hoop skirts, ball gowns and confederate soldiers absent of course the realities of slavery and others are wedding destinations some have become master plan residential communities we got a lot of those in Houston Plantation Remix will be a site specific neospiritual and performance that gives a tour of historical US plantations and is designed to rehabilitate remix and reimagine the afterlife of plantations as functional sites that contribute to contemporary anti-racism work and America's need for ongoing dialogue healing and progress on race you can go to the video this excerpt opening scene for The Burnin presents a reimagined plantation tour while integrating and interrogating it rejecting a single story of US history through a multi-perspective visual and sonic interpretation of the tours unspoken layers of contrasting experiences visibility invisibility stereotype silence privilege and power the clip it's about three minutes this particular clip was presented at the first congregational church in Atlanta which was established in 1867 and is known for its historical connections to abolition and efforts to educate recently free African-Americans after the Civil War so this clip captures an early workshop attempt by my company to remix a historic site as a physical and symbolic backdrop using the play's performance this plantation tour performance and themes as the mode of analysis for the space and for historical context