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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:
“Thy Myopia of Desire” - a 3-day durational performance, film, and installation piece by Jamie Funk
“And if the opposite of desiring is boredom, where is loving? If the opposite of desiring is to be bored, what does it mean to love? ... If the opposite of being desired is to be boring, what does it mean to be loved? Or must we not speak of this wholly (holy?) other, intangible, gasping thing?
Functioning as a barrier to the desire of the gaze that never reaches its destination, the bed holds one at a distance. Physical distance may, however, be overcome, but emotional proximity remains noticeably, at times comfortably, absent.” Read more…
“Climate” - a 6-hour durational performance performed by Raegan Truax and GOODW.Y.N
Climate is a new durational performance created by Raegan Truax and GOODW.Y.N. As trans and gender variant people in the United States face the newest wave of attacks on genderfull life, the artists explore the limits and possibilities of co-creating a queer aerosphere. Beginning from a collective proposal to each other and the audience — “we are weathering”— the performance explores the various weather conditioning our climates. Read more…
Jamie Funk
Jamie Funk (b. 1997, Philadelphia, PA) is a multi-media artist with works converging video, sculpture, performance, and writing. Beginning from studying spatial, psychological, and philosophical research (either originating from others or from self-studies/reflections), Funk explores the body’s relation to space and to itself within the deeply personal subjects of sex work, addiction, queerness and BDSM.
Her work has been exhibited at the Mark Morris Dance Center, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the William Way LGBT Community Center, House of Yes, and Spring Studios. Her writing has also appeared in Math Magazine, an international magazine that highlights the diversity of bodies and sexual desires. Funk’s work often centers around the body’s (both of herself and her audience) ever-shifting relation to space and to itself within the deeply personal subjects of sex work, addiction, queerness and BDSM.
https://www.thefunkportal.space/
Raegan Truax
Raegan Truax is a durational performer whose work explores new ways of being in relation to our bodies, the world, and each other.
In 2019, Truax began working on a series of 12+ hour performances conceptualized around public mourning and collective grief.
Truax is the curator of the ON DURATION performance platform which supports durational artists to work collaboratively and share their practice with one another and the public. ON DURATION highlights performance as an evolving axis of political, aesthetic, and creative possibility, and amplifies the precise skill sets of diverse durational practitioners in order to investigate how rearranging relationships to time, space, and body can unmake oppressive systems and structures.
GOODW.Y.N
Nicole Goodwin aka GOODW.Y.N. is the author of Warcries, and the poetic sequel Warcrimes. They are a finalist for the CUE Foundation’s 2022 Public Programs Fellowship, as well as the 2020 Pushcart Nominee, 2018-2019 Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient, the 2018 Ragdale Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship Recipient, 2017 EMERGENYC Hemispheric Institute Fellow and the 2013- 2014 Queer Art Mentorship Queer Art Literary Fellow.
They published the articles “Talking with My Daughter…” and “Why is this Happening in Your Life…” in the New York Times’ parentblog Motherlode. Additionally, their work “Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): Poems,” is longlisted for The Black Spring Press Group’s The Christopher Smart-Joan Alice Prize for 2020, and their work "Desert Flowers" was shortlisted and selected for performance by the Women's Playwriting International Conference in Cape Town, South Africa in 2015.