Suzanne Fiol 2018 Curatorial Fellows Queer Trash present Queer Trash: the Symposium, featuring Justin Allen, Derek Baron, Lorene Bouboushian, Ivoire Foreman, Sarah Hennies, Crystal Penalosa, and Claire Rousay. An auspicious meeting of some very bright and very queer minds, the evening showcases the myriad ways that queers make sound, make sound queer, or skim around terms that may attempt to contain queer life.
An admixture of conversational discourse and live performance, the Symposium presents a slice of the endlessly sweeping range of current queer performance practices. The evening kicks off with a moderated discussion with the participants, touching on topics of their practice -- how they think, hear, and otherwise receive the world -- and is rounded out with blasts of performances and presentations by each artist in rapid succession.
Queer Trash was founded by Michael Foster and Richard Kamerman in spring 2016. Active participants in experimental music scenes in New York City, Foster and Kamerman created Queer Trash in response to a lack of a dedicated queer platform within their communities. Queer Trash has hosted eight events at seven different locations throughout New York City, presenting both local and touring artists from as far as Mexico and Sweden working across experimental aesthetics and practices. A participant in the fifth Queer Trash, Eames Armstrong joined Queer Trash in July 2017 as the third curator of the series after six years of organizing visual and performance art in Washington, D.C.
Justin Allen is a writer and performer from Northern Virginia. He has read at the Poetry Project, Kampnagel, and Serpentine Sackler Gallery, and performed at Artists Space, Knockdown Center, and Queer Abstract.
Derek Baron (b. Illinois, 1989) is an artist working mostly with sound and music. Their solo work assembles pre-recorded sound in an attempt at documentary realism. Their recent written and audio work has tried to engage with questions of whiteness and the audiovisual complex. In addition to their solo practice, Derek's collaborative projects include Cop Tears (a once-a-year amateur chamber group), Permanent Six Flags (an epistolary duo and residency program), and Causings (a “home & garden” bricolage family band). Derek has released albums on such imprints as Penultimate Press, Recital Program, Power Moves Library, Pentiments, and Silt Editions. With Emily Martin, Derek co-operates the Reading Group record label from their apartment in New York. In April 2018, Reading Group released a 3-disc LP edition of the 1989 tape journals of artist David Wojnarowicz. Derek is currently working towards a PhD in Historical Musicology at New York University, where they are researching racial politics of concrete music and the role of sound in experimental documentary film. Upcoming recorded works include a solo LP documenting a canoe trip with their dad, a double-CD album of Richard Wagner fan fiction by Permanent Six Flags, a first-time duo collaboration with field recordist Christian Mirande for Erstwhile’s AEU imprint, and an LP of Cop Tears playing dodgy arrangements of the complete piano music of Theodor Adorno.
Lorene Bouboushian works within dance, experimental music/noise, and performance art. They build a rhizomatic practice through visible forays into performances and workshopping, and less visible forays into writing, dialogue, modes of care and support, and resource sharing. They utilize "self-exposure and vulnerability in real, risky ways" [CultureBot, 2011], and produce “thought-provoking commentary on social limits” [Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2016]. They have shared their work in galleries and theaters in Seattle, Madison, Athens, and Beirut, performing in festivals including New Genre Festival (Tulsa), Miami Performance International Festival, QueerNY and Queer Zagreb, Inverse Performance Art Festival, and Month of Performance Art-Berlin. They have shared their interdisciplinary teaching practice at universities in Kentucky, Beirut, and Mexico. They have collaborated with Forced Into Femininity (as missdick vibrocis), Kaia Gilje, Lindsey Drury, Matthew D. Gantt, Valerie Kuehne, and Panoply Performance Lab, and performed for Yoshiko Chuma, Yvonne Meier, Melinda Ring, luciana achugar, Daria Fain, and Kathy Westwater. They are a former member of NYC based collectives XHOIR (organized by Colin Self), Feminist Art Group (organized by IV Castellanos), and Social Health Performance Club. They are currently an Artist-In-Residence at Movement Research, in process as a dancer with Jill Sigman/Thinkdance, working with a think-tank through 9 PROPOSITIONS (Panoply), and a member of the Civic Reflex cohort (also Panoply). See youtube, ig @lorene.bouboushian, and www.lorenebouboushian.org.
Ivoire Foreman employs various mediums, experiences, pop culture, childhood, time periods, audio recordings, Trans magic, and un-comfortableness to re appropriate and reflect the dysphoria, shame, objectification of the trans, queer, POC and marginalized existence. They create art contemporary to them and the many communities they move within, developing validation through visibility. They are heavily influenced by Faith Ringgold, Lisa Frank, Kara Walker, Ebony Patterson, Sara Sze, Barbra Kruger, Neil Gaiman, Octavia Butler, comics, video games, science fiction, John Cage, and Space. Ivoire studied at the San Francisco Art institute, received their BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and hold an MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts. They live, create, make, and work in Brooklyn, New York.
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY. Her work utilizes an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice in a subversive examination of psychoacoustics, queer identity, and performance art. She has presented her work in a variety of contexts including Café Oto (London), cave12 (Geneva), Ende Tymes (NYC), Festival Cable (Nantes), the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center, O’ Art Space (Milan), and Second Edition (Stockholm) and has received commissions for new work from Cristian Alvear, Bearthoven, Bent Frequency, R. Andrew Lee, LIMINAR, Qubit Music, and the Thin Edge New Music Collective. Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New Music USA, New York State Council on the Arts, and in 2016 was awarded a fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hennies is currently a member of improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence. In late 2017 she premiered the groundbreaking work, Contralto at Issue Project Room (NYC), a film featuring a cast of transgender women with a live score for string quartet and three percussionists. In 2013, Hennies founded the record label Weighter Recordings, releasing works by artists working at the fringes of contemporary music including Prune Bécheau, Thomas Bonvalet, Morgan Evans-Weiler, Tim Feeney, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Enrico Malatesta, and Matt Sargent.
Crystal Penalosa (they/them) is an American artist & interdisciplinary designer based in New York. Their work focuses on queer identity, utilizing modular electronics and voice. Penalosa has performed collaboratively and solo in New York at Issue Project Room, Roulette Intermedium, Sediment Gallery, MoMA PS1, Experimental Intermedia, and at Spektrum in Berlin. They currently work with the veteran underground record label Generations Unlimited. Artist Statement: Generally, the solo work I present makes public my search for authenticity and how it intersects with trans visibility. Presently, I am using electronics, voice, and light in a performance exploring how my voice is a source of power and safety. The structure is meditative and is centered on voice affirmations I wrote for myself when I began voice self-therapy.
Claire Rousay is a Canadian-American improvisor, composer, and curator based in San Antonio, Texas. Drawn to improvisation by a desire to free their percussion practice from the constraints of conventional timekeeping, Rousay explores the emotional overlap of rhythm, speed, and texture as both a soloist and participant in creative partnerships that span the United States. Citing artists like Luis Arturo Aguirre and Cecil Taylor as inspiration, they continually seek to affirm the liberating power and strong ethical commitments of playing free. Since entering the improvising community in 2016, Rousay has toured extensively across North America, booking 220 dates in 2017 alone. Their travels have found them performing with a range of collaborators, including Jacob Wick, Paul Giallorenzo, Brandon Lopez, Tom Carter, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten and many more. This summer will see Rousay hitting the road multiple times with Brandon Lopez, Jacob Wick and Michael Foster as well as ensemble appearances at the Sonic Transmissions and NMASS festivals in Austin, Texas. Rousay also curates Contemporary Whatever, a monthly series for adventurous art in San Antonio; they also collaborated with Artpace to produce the inaugural Right Now Festival in August 2017, which brought experimental and improvising performers to town from across Texas. Rousay has also released a steady stream of solo recordings on labels including Kendra Steiner Editions and Hard Fun in the US and Colour8 in the UK, as well as their own Rat Tail Tapes label. Their output ranges from the extended-technique kit explorations of “blip” and “Anatomize” to “of SIRI”’s MIDI orchestrations and the EAI of “IMP/ENV”. Their most recent release, Divide, is was released on Already Dead Tapes on April 20th.
