The void is alert, searching the sweet tempt. Time scatters smoke. The void dances in the breath. Fashioned without poise, it pisses futility, the sober solid. It writhes, drunk on the mush. The solid self-destructs; it abandons infinity. Knowledge glimpses infinity, it knows no duplicates. The posers tantalize. They net the void. Infinity soothes the void. Venom seethes the belly bound. We wait.
— James K, Venomist Manifesto
James K continues her 2018 ISSUE residency with the premiere of Venomist Choir, a piece exploring how voice, and more specifically the mouth, operates as a subversive architecture, vessel, and stage. An electroacoustic composition and multimedia choreography embedded within the context of an official New York Fashion Week show by art and fashion imprint Lou Dallas, the work simultaneously unmasks voice and the nexus existing between fashion, performance, and composition. Venomist approaches a new poetics and politics of voice through the specific manipulation of abject gesticulations of the mouth -- chewing, licking, popping, spitting, choking, etc. -- sounds that challenge inherited conceptions of domesticated female vocalization and structures, both social and political, which serve to objectify and contain female vocality. Despite using deconstructive techniques that attempt to collapse and subvert these structures, James K critically implicates our inherent and cyclical participation within rigid frames that seize our insides: venom’s oozing digestions and disintegration.
James K uses the setting of the fashion runway as a unique staging ground, sonically intersecting with Lou Dallas’ singular textile practice of in-house loomed knits, found fabrics, and highly detailed embroidery and sequins all done by hand. Employing similarly multiplicitous uses of materials and contexts -- both James K and Lou Dallas share a penchant for overlapping embellished textures that fragment female tropes, creating collaged, hybrid visions of femininity and the female body. Across sound and textile, the artists establish the feminine as an entangled “other” beyond often stifling human constructs, where fashion and classical sound are particularly pressurized sites. As a result, Venomist vocally renders the uncontainable through elaborate visual iconography and the overflowing sonic possibilities of the mouth amplified and “prepared” with bubblegum, food, and liquids. James K extends the piece onto the fashion runaway itself through choreography and video; the work is presented in quadraphonic sound.
Venomist is situated within James K’s 2018 ISSUE residency which explores the gender of sound through discrete works that can be seen as iterations of personas in development for her upcoming double LP on PAN records.
In 2013, Lou Dallas woke up on a Rhode Island beach covered in glowing moonstones. After stuffing her bags, she followed the moon's path to New York. Since then, she has continued her lawless pursuit of treasure and delight through space, time, and the realms of the fantastic, ripping through dimensions and dragging the trains of her many mantles behind her.
Created by Raffaella Hanley in 2017, Lou Dallas is comprised of majority deadstock or recycled materials, and features loomed knits, embroidery, and embellishments all done by hand. www.loudallas.com | @LOU_DALLAS
James K is a New York native multi-disciplinary artist who has honed her peculiar aesthetic to include a fusion of visual and sonic elements. Deeply rooted in a conscious art practice and a mythology of her own, her sound, equally organic and electronic, is a combination of odd dreams, hybridizing enchanted samples, ripped, broken and morphed rhythms, and vocals, both incomprehensible and appealing -- forming a multi-faceted identity. She received her BFA in Printmaking from The Rhode Island School of Design, where she developed a critical multidisciplinary art practice shaped by feminist theory and writing. She has established herself within the Providence, New York, and Berlin scenes of experimental artists and musicians. Since 2012, she has been represented by Loyal Gallery, where she has exhibited solo work in both their Malmo and Stockholm locations, in addition to showing at Miami Art Basel, NY Frieze, and LA Art Contemporary. She has released her music with labels PAN, Dial, 1080p, UNO NYC, and her own label, She Rocks! She has toured through the US and Europe extensively, performing for a variety of audiences; from underground spaces, established galleries, and museums, to well established venues, festivals, and theaters, such as the Münchner Kammerspiele, Moma PS1, Berlin Biennale, and Kunsthalle Bern. She is currently working towards her MFA at Bard College, and will release her follow up full-length LP on PAN.
