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Spring 2023: Rain, Clouds, Unicorns, and Rainbows
“My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity. And that that solidarity might incite further joy. Which might incite further solidarity. And on and onn. . . It’s why I think of joy, which gets us to love, as being a practice of survival.” - Excerpt From: Ross Gay. “Inciting Joy.”
Particles of water or ice are suspended in the air, become submerged into one another until they are too big to float, and fall to the ground as rain, snow, sleet, hail drizzle, cats and dogs, and liquid sunshine until all of life depends on the resulting fresh water. Rain is changing too and, like clouds, is in abundance or scarce.
Then there is a rainbow! Sometimes even two! Suddenly there is magic in the air as the full spectrum of light shines back down on us. Rainbows seem invisible, like to magic of unicorns, until we find them, and when we see them, they see us.
Spring 2023 at Grace Exhibition Space: We are expressing the multitude of rain and clouds and unicorns and rainbows that allow us to find the resulting joy.
PERFORMANCES
"Next Performance 2023" - MIAO JIAXIN
The performance takes a glance at risk-free thoughts/talks/actions in arts and culture.
Reconflection - J ALEX RAY
J collects the souls of her audience and arranges them into a sculpture of themself.
Scary Monsters - and Hybrid Creeps - Alexander del re
Be Happy or Die is a performative installation exploration of the consequence of subtle or not aggressions of migration policies in Denmark on minorities, outcasts, different bodies and minds. Be Happy or Die is an electromagnetic field recording and narrative orchestra questioning our inner sensory censorship regarding liberty and freedom when articulated by happiness.
Be Happy or Die is a collective and tangible experience reflecting on the current pandemic—especially our new collective behaviours and our relationship with others.
'GRW/M - Get Ready With Monstera' - MONSTERA DELICIOSA
“Both intimate and public, both solipsistic and collective, both grand and anticlimactic, GRW/M is a polymorphous act of space contouring and self-sculpting. A score, a chore, an ambiguous litany - or lullaby - of pacing and (re)-tracing, indeed of making and un-making, between self-pampering and communal ritual. A caress, a scratch, a hymn, an epitaph. Elusive and seductive. Catch me if you can.”
PERFORMERS
MIAO JIAXIN
Beginning in Shanghai, where his photography works expressed the universal theme of urban angst, Miao immigrated to New York, expanding his view of urban streets towards a more conceptual public stage. Among his performative practices across different media, Miao has blended his naked body into the bleak streets of a midnight New York City, traveled inside a suitcase hauled by his mother through urban crowds, made live-feed erotic performances on an interactive pornographic broadcasting website, and dressed as a Chinese businessman for an entire year when working towards his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is more widely known for converting his New York studio into a jail and charging $1 per night as accommodation on Airbnb. The same studio later was converted again to be a blind dating (meeting) spot, as well as a massage therapy clinic. Miao’s works often express the ambivalent and sometimes antagonistic tension that always exists between the individual and governing or cultural authorities, questioning assumptions about power in relation to identity politics. He posits the artist’s nature as one who transgresses boundaries, challenges consensus, and stays distant from authorities.
J ALEX RAY
is a Brooklyn-based Californian movement artist. Originally a painter, Ray naturally gravitated toward self-portraiture and has since centered her work around “the self”. Although their body is the primary vehicle and inspiration for her work, they use dance, stillness, and general social distress to connect more vulnerably with her audience.
Ray is now better known for their pole dancing, as they’ve competed and performed in a variety of pole dance showcases throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Confronting the relationship between fear and intimacy as a means of self-governance and growth, J is eager to lead his audience toward deeper self reflection.
ALEXANDER DEL RE
is an educator, curator, organizer and performance artist for over 30 years; to this date he has presented his work in over 20 countries of Europe, Asia and the Americas.
He has been guest curator of the international performance art festivals“Interakcje”, in Poland and “Blow!” in Germany, and at “Grace Exhibition Space”, in New York, USA.
He has published extensively about the contemporary performance art scene of Chile and Latin America in magazines in the U.K., Japan and Canada; his work also has been featured in art magazines in Europe and America, as well as in the books “Performance y Arte-Acción en América Latina” (Mexico, 2005), and “Copying Eden, contemporary art in Chile” (Chile, 2006).
He was organizer and curator of the first international performance art festival in Santiago, Chile, called “Performare” in 1997. He was co-founder of PerfoPuerto, an independent performance art organization based in Chile, with which he organized 12 international performance art festivals from 2002-2008 in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, presenting the work of over 120 artists from 30 countries worldwide. Currently he is co-founder and director of PerfoLink, Latin American platform for performance art; since 2009 he has curated and co-organized 20 international performance art festivals and many smaller events in Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile, presenting the work of over 200 artists from 33 countries worldwide. In 2020, he curated and organized “CuerpAs International”, a live-online performance art festival streamed from a webinar platform (and simultaneously live on Perfolink’s YouTube channel), featuring women artists from all continents of the world, including the legendary durational performance artist, Linda Montano.
MONSTERA DELICIOSA
“I am no artist, but have inhabited spaces and practices that some would call artistic. A she-they kind of womxn, I live through the joys of trans-feminism, the perils of visibility and the paradoxes - physical and philosophical - that existing outside of the gender binary brings (boo to assimilation!).
My work endeavors to articulate this all - be it through the minutia of clapping sand out of my perspex heels onto a church pew, or the grandeur of climbing a building’s facade to reach for my lipstick, in a balancing act between endurance and elegance, compulsion and commotion.
Neither here nor there, but mostly all over, Monstera tries to unsettle what is perceived as spectacular, disappearing the durational into the liminal, collapsing the monumental into the ephemeral, melting the grand with the clumsy.
Hope you'll like her - if you hate her"