Young Women's Caucus Performance: February 10 at Raandesk Gallery

YOUNG WOMEN’S CAUCUS: WHAT YOUNG WOMEN WANT

as part of LIVE SPACE: women + art + activism National Women's Caucus for Art

February 10, 2011

7-9 p.m.

Raandesk Gallery

16 W. 23rd Street, 4th Floor (Chelsea)

NYC

(Artists pictured: Of our Own Volition photo by Stephanie Trevino,Marina Kelly and Megan Katz with performers Michael Eckblad and Andrew Dayton of the Notion Collective, Chanel Matsunami Govreau, Amanda Lovelee, Green Light Arts, Megan Kelley and Suguna Sridha, and Bonnie MacAllister)

PROGRAM LISTING

1) "On our Own Volition"featuring:

Artists: Amanda Moyer, J.R. DeMers, Susie Danielson, Stephanie Trevino, Amanda Mears, Dawn Hiltz

Performance Description:

Knitting and crochet has deep roots in the history of women as homemakers and textile artists. Often times, women would gather and make the activity a social occasion in which they would discuss topics that were important to them. Graffiti art is a modern form of expression, but is often solitary. Six women came together to express themselves through yarn graffiti and found themselves conversing about many subjects – some silly, some deep. Yarn graffiti ties together our disparate interests with an authentic, whimsical spirit, and in a very real and literal way, it ties us together not only as young people, women, or artists, but as humans. Through the documentation of this process of knot making and the act of installing the yarn graffiti, these six ladies invite the viewer to discover a personal conversation about desires, common threads, and topics uniquely their own.

Susie Danielson will graduate from Finlandia University with a degree in Fashion

Design this spring. Optimism, playfulness, and delight are expressed through the artwork the Danielson creates.

J.R. DeMers, an Illustration and Fashion Design Major in her senior year, draws

inspiration for her artwork from music, dance, and various cultures. DeMers plans on traveling to Japan to pursue her passions in teaching and art in the coming year.

Dawn Hiltz is a second year Graphic Design student, originally from Dover, Delaware. Hiltz joined the YWC to network, have a good time and make lasting friendships.

Amanda Mears is a junior at Finlandia University working towards a BFA with

concentrations in Ceramics & Sculpture. She is also starting to focus on Fiber/Fashion Design. Mears’ work revolves around an obsessive love for anything geeky, cute and childish. She finds inspiration from the games, movies and stories of her childhood and creates with a focus on the visual aesthetic.

Amanda Moyer, a senior in Integrated Design at Finlandia University, draws inspiration from the materialist suburbs she has experienced since youth. Environmental, social, and economic sustainability as well as gender roles are the driving forces of her multi-media artwork and upcycled designs.

Stephanie Trevino is a photographer whose current work focuses on portraiture that explores the individual's relationship with natural places and imaginary worlds. She graduates in May with her BFA from Finlandia University. Her senior project is the conversion of a short school bus into an art classroom on wheels to bring art education and experiences to places that lack art resources.

2) Spoken For

Artists: Megan Katz and Marina Kelly with performers Andrew Dayton, Michael

Eckblad, Jason Bahling and Jonathan Wohl of the Notion Collective.

Spoken For features women's intimate stories of want, using live performance and video in a multi-media exploration of women's desires as expressed via male voices.

Artists

Megan Katz is an anthropologist-turned-artist with a particular interest in how feelings, thoughts, words, and language shape the visible and concrete parts of our lives. She works in documentary film, video, performance and installation--always with an eye on points of intersection between the physical world and interior landscapes. She has her MFA in visual art from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MA in Anthropology.

Marina Kelly is a multi-media artist who works in the fields of performance, video and installation. Her interests include the remediation of public spaces, site

specific performance and intervention, screen-dance and video art. Marina is a founding member of Dear Heart Dance collective based in Madison, Wisconsin and is currently working on her Masters of Fine Arts degree in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Performers:

Jason Bahling is a videographer, installation, and time based artist. While his video

production experience spans the gamut, Jason prefers to collaborate with choreographers, musicians, and theatre companies. He is co-director of contemporary dance company LizZieMoVeS Co (SF), and co-founder of Notion Collective(NYC). Jason's video projections revel in the physicality of time, light and space to create moving landscapes, altered realities, and evocative textures that conceptually augment and visually enhance live performances of many genres.

Andy Dayton is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He got his start making videos, but his work has coursed through a range of different media; from performance, to sculpture, to illustration, and often somewhere outside and in-between. Recent appearances have included work at the Walker Art Center's "Open Field" and the DUMBO Arts Festival in Brooklyn, NY. Andy received an undergraduate degree from the InterArts and Technology program at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and is a founding member of The Notion Collective.

Michael Eckblad is a New York City-based artist whose work ranges from the

performative to the visually formal, often incorporating light emitters through video, photography, installation and environments. He responds to the local through work that evolves in both time and space, and frequently collaborates with dancers and actors. He also shares much of his work on michaeleckblad.com.

Jonathan Wohl is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working primarily in new media and sound design. Currently involved with The Notion Collective and the Astoria Creative Group, his work incorporates concept-driven performance and experimental instrument design. A new piece by Wohl will be featured in the upcoming show EXPRESS | LOCAL at the Queens College Art Center.

3) "Requesting Access"

Description: Requesting Access is collaborative photo shoot performance by Chanel Matsunami Govreau (played by Asian Barbie), photographer Martin Solheim and makeup/hair artist Tamara Qabazard. This performance layers the exaggeration of cultural costuming over questionably (un)real storytelling. This is combined with the friction and vanity of flash photography to explore multiracial identity and gender in interracial relationships as it combines with expectations of sexuality and its possible profit.

Performers:

Chanel Matsunami Govreau/Queen Gidrea uses her body, face, regalia, and word as a site of performance storytelling. Her work is inhabited by neon luxury artifacts, fabulous character exaggerations and futuristic prophecies based on her experiences as a queer, multiracial, and Asian-American woman. In her practice, she utilizes a combination of humor, glamour, and self -exposure to engage in dialogue about ethnic stereotyping and hypersexualization. She seeks to extract and confront her own internalized oppressions by disrupting patterns of racism, sexism and homophobia while indulging herself completely.

Matsunami-Govreau has worked as social activist, arts educator and community organizer for nearly ten years. She is currently in the last year of the BFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has lived in Japan, Chicago, Madison, and New York City.

Martin Solheim is an internationally published and galleried voyeur based out of Chicago and New York. Even though Martin has a background in product and fashion/commercial photography, his main interest is documenting the process of raw human emotion centered on physical and emotional pain, pleasure, and power roles specific to the subject to reflect the common denominator despite the differences in people’s time-honored labels. He has a talent of capturing moments with precision and odd timings, which stems from musical technicality and theory. Martins use of colored lighting is a paradox due to his inability to distinguish both

blue and red, which is one of the rarest forms of color blindness. He frequently goes back to his roots of “ninja-style” street photography to juxtapose socioeconomic hierarchies and the common man’s collapse thus allowing untold stories to be seen.

Tamara Qabazard is a published model turned stylist: hair, make up, and wardrobe. Her use of highly pigmented palates reflects her experiences with synesthesia. As a recent biology graduate, her experimentation with structure, volume and technicality using hair as well as wardrobe design draws inspiration from the shapes and functions of the body and her Middle Eastern heritage. Tamara enjoys collaborating with other artists and is based out of Kuwait, Lebanon, Chicago, and NYC.

4) 45th Presidency by Alex Dilks Pandola and Green Light Arts (Philadelphia)

Starring Natasha Lee Martin

Description: It's January 20th, 2013 and you're invited to the inauguration of the 45th President of The United States of American, America's first woman President, Sarah Louise Palin. If you don't think it can happen, please see the 44th President. Is this the last thing women want? What women? Join Green Light Arts as we listen to President Palin's Inaugural Speech and see how she intends to turn the Mama Grizzlies loose on Washington. Keep your car doors locked!

Natasha Lee Martin (Performer)

Natasha has appeared in television and film roles on FOX, TLC, DISNEY, NIPPON TV JAPAN and many stages. She is also an adjunct professor of theatre, teaches workshops in New York City and is a private acting coach. For more info please go to www.natashaleemartin.com She is thrilled to be performing and collaborating with Alex for such a vital event!

Alex Dilks Pandola (Writer, Director)

Alex is the founder and Artistic Director of Green Light Arts. Since 2003, she has created and produced performances and plays that explore the role of women in society including GLO and The New Light Series. For more info please go to www.GreenLightArts.com. Alex has a BA in Theatre from Amercian University and an MFA in Producing and Theatre Management from Columbia University.

5) Title: Trading Flowers for Love Stories

Artist: Amanda Lovelee

Free wild flower (photo) for your love story. I have gathered images of wild, uncultivated plants. I would like to trade a photograph for a hand written love story. Simply show up write down your story and then you can pick any picture. You can keep it anonymous or you can include names, dates, times, locations. The stories will be gathered and compiled to form an archive, a historical record, and a book. You will receive the link to the print on demand book if you would like a copy.

Amanda Lovelee is interested in how people connect and the spaces in which they do so within contemporary society. Her work, mainly video and photography, weaves together data, stories and personal experience to create non-linear narratives about the fragility of human relationships. Her recent work has explored a myriad of topics: family history, the lives of beekeepers and ice fishermen, strangers’ love stories and the sociology of square dancing.

5) Film: "I am the doubter and the doubt"

Artists: Megan Kelley and Suguna Sridhar

"Shadow and sunlight are the same, the vanished gods to me appear, and one to me are shame and fame;" this poetry, smoke, mirrors, gathering darkness, light, and a pair of selves are invoked to explore the discontinuity and interdependent nature of a routine carried out in Trenton, NJ. Post-industrial slums, a World War II memorial, and the artists' live and workspaces are reinvented to transmute the quoted Emerson poem, "Brahma" (1856).

b. 1983 in Wilmington, DE; Megan Kelley is a multidimensional performance artist. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Art History degrees from Rutgers University—concentrating in drawing, painting, and non-western art practices. Her work has been exhibited at Art House, New Brunswick, NJ; the Mason Gross Galleries at Civic Square, New Brunswick, NJ; Willis Hardware via the Salem County Arts Alliance, Penns Grove, NJ; the Roebling Wire Works, Trenton, NJ; the Psychology Suite Graduate Exhibition Space at Caldwell College, Caldwell, NJ; and VWVOFFKA, Philadelphia, PA. Megan Kelley works in psychiatrics and is an Art Therapy Specialization graduate student at Caldwell College in NJ; she lives in Philadelphia, PA. She encourages contact and may be reached via mgnklly.net.

Suguna Sridhar graduated from Rutgers University with a degree in Women & Gender Studies. As an activist throughout college, writing became a respite to explore similar ideas, but via metaphor. She also engages in mediums of theatre, video, and performance art. Suguna recently worked as a farmer in South Korea, and is currently based in Mumbai, India.

6) Film: “Deconstructed Breath Verse”

The film features MacAllister’s Pushcart prize nominated piece “Rosary” (2007). “My very Catholic mother/Who says her penance weekly/Gave me the device/When I asked her/ Why the elderly lady wore the necklace/So tightly around her crinkled wrists /While whispering at the bus stop.”

Bonnie MacAllister is currently Young Women’s Caucus Performance Chair for the National Women’s Caucus for Art 2011 Conference LIVE SPACES which emphasizes new media and activism. She is a member of the International Committee of the Women’s Caucus for Art. As a member of the Women’s Caucus for Art, Bonnie has collaborated with her fellow members to organize touring exhibitions with Afghan women, launched an exhibition to fundraise for the Girls Gotta Run foundation for teen marathon runners whom she visited in Ethiopia on a Fulbright-Hays grant, curated an art show for an International Women’s Day celebration exhibition in conjunction with a citywide literacy project based on the graphic novel Persepolis, and she is currently coordinating an exhibition on Women and Water sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania, Women's Center, South Asia Center, Middle East Center, United Nations Association of Greater Philadelphia, Women's Campaign International, CARE, Philadephia Global Water Initiative, and Engineers Without Borders. She will show this year at the Delaware Art Museum and her multimedia performance work is featured at festivals and through Green Light Arts at the Shubin Theatre. She is the author of Some Words Are No Longer Words, Coptic: Ethiopian Mysticism, and several artist books in collections at Barnard, the Brooklyn Art Library, Utopia Museum (Italy), and la Galeria del MEC (Uruguay).