Sick

May 9
SICK
Rik Haber & Cheena Marie Lo
SF LGBT Community Center, 2^nd floor 1800 Market St.
6:00pm visual arts opening, 7:30pm performance and video showcase
FREE

SICK is a performance, visual and video arts showcase featuring 16 gender variant artists from around the US who are chronically ill. Definitions are inherently constraining which is why many gender variant and chronically ill folks resist identity categories that often hew to normative binaries. SICK artists have created works to explore the intersection of gender and illness and how complicated and interesting existing outside of normative experiences can be.

This FREE event takes place on Thursday, May 9^th at the San Francisco LGBT Center starting with the visual arts exhibition at 6:00pm, followed by videos and performances at 7:30pm.

Check out our artist’s biographies and work samples at our website sickcollective.org and join us on Facebook at http://on.fb.me/166Dad2  We are proudly co-sponsored by the Queer Cultural Center, El Rio, Fabulosa Fest, Hard French, Michael Malter, Rainbow Grocery: A Worker Owned Cooperative, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and The Trans Justice Funding Project.

Website: sickcollective.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/414078348683492/?ref=ts&fref=ts
FUNDERS AND SPONSORS
Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence
Rainbow Grocery: A Worker Owned Corporative
Trans Justice Funding Project

ARTISTS BIOS

Visual Artists:

Skip Heatwave is a canadian queer trans artist residing in New Orleans. He publishes his own comic called “SO OUTTA HERE” of which there is four issues to date. He is a printmaker art school drop-out. Skip’s work is always deeply personal and usually rooted in the juxtaposition of memory and fantasy. This will be Skip’s first venture into talking about his world as a type one diabetic and the way it relates with all the parts of his identity in the art medium.

Terry X is a writer and visual artist born and raised in the Bay Area. Their rising is in Scorpio and their moon wishes it was is in the crescent-shaped glint of Beyoncé’s eyes. They currently spend a lot of their time reading library books and making waves with local artists before they must bid farewell to the Bay for Los Angeles and the study of cinema later this year. They also enjoy making wearable items that salute queer existence. Other fields of interest include global feminism, magic, decolonization, psychoanalysis, and coconuts.

Emmet Phipps is a queer, transgender printmaker, HIV/AIDS specialist registered nurse, learning herbalist, and soon to be Family Nurse Practitioner providing primary care to transgender communities. They are white/Polish-American, and come from a working class family in the northeast U.S.  Emmet got Type 1 diabetes at age nineteen, around the same time they started printmaking. Emmet has lived in Brooklyn, NY their whole adult life.  They are a nurse/organizer with Third Space Healing at the Audre Lorde Project in NYC and with the Allied Media Conference in Detroit where they work on new models of healthcare/community care alongside folks from disability and healing justice movements. If you have any questions about Emmet’s artwork, you can contact them at [email protected].

Dominic Cinnamon Bradley is a Black gender non-conforming, ‘crip and sick’ multidisciplinary artist from the Dirty South. Dominic holds a B.A. in Sociology from The Johns Hopkins University and an M.S. in Social Work from Columbia University.   During a tenure with the We Got Issues! Leadership Institute, Dominic came to identify centrally as an artist-activist. Dominic has explored acting, spoken word, visual art, performance art, photography, and film with plans to expand into  more disciplines.  Dominic is a proud member of grassroots organization Black Women’s Blueprint and is active in their efforts to eradicate rape and sexual assault. Dominic recently completed  EMERGENYC—a program of New York University’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Dominic now has a residency with the Roots and River Emerging Artist Mentorship Program, which centers the work of queer artists of color.  For more information about Dominic’s work, please visit www.dommebomb.com

Creatrix Tiara is an interdisciplinary iconoclast exploring the liminality of being a queer female migrant minority through performance art, writing, music, and whatever form fits the message best. She is currently undertaking an MFA in Creative Inquiry at the California Institute of Integral Studies while also actively participating in community activist art around the Bay Area.http://creatrixtiara.com

Erin Upshaw is a Tennessee based artist.

Charlie Laguna is an Oakland based artist

Performance and Video Artists

Sarah Barnard is a multidisciplinary artist and film maker. Her artwork investigates the fluidity of “the other” within a hetero-normative spectrum and examines the ways in which gender performance, desire and objectification are inter‐related through power structures. While there may be aesthetic differences among her sculptures, photographs and film projects, they are firmly linked to one another by recurring modes of contemplation. Barnard’s work has been shown at Gallery 825 in West Hollywood, the Harriet & Charles Luckman Gallery in Los Angeles, the Pete & Susan Barrett Gallery in Santa Monica among others across the US. Most recently Barnard’s film I Heart Boys was recognized by Australia’s Queer Fruits Film Festival as 2012’s winner of Outstanding Experimental Short.

Annie Murphy is an Oregon based artist.

DavEnd is a tender-hearted, genderqueer, accordion wielding songwriter, performing artist and designer based in San Francisco. DavEnd has released two studio albums (How To Hold Your Own Hand, Fruits Commonly Mistaken For Vegetables) and for the past 6 years, has been touring extensively in the U.S., performing at queer teen centers, festivals, colleges, theatres and backyards. Between tours, Ms. End designs costumes, and most recently has been producing a new musical, costume designing and dancing in production numbers for songwriter Kimya Dawson, and appearing in Taylor Mac’s epic 5 hour play, The Lily’s Revenge. DavEnd’s current project, “Fabulous Artistic Guys Get Overtly Traumatized Sometimes: The Musical!”, brings together the worlds of music and radical performance art in a theatrical extravaganza, exploring the effects of heterosexism and street harassment on the development of queer identity.

Jonah Aline Daniel is a gender variant, white, jewish, chronically ill, amphibious body worker, energetic herbalist, organizer, candlemaker, anti-zionist, radical, spiritual, intuitive, introvert.I am committed to decolonization, embodiment, consent, radical liberatory Judaism, the ocean, ending capitalism, white supremacy, christian dominance and patriarchy, affordable accessible culturally relevant health and healing, earth and environmental justice, plant communication, growing food and medicine, safety for all bodies, mushrooms, bees, home.I am falling more in love with plants and plant medicine every day, deepening in my respect for the wisdom and power of the body, building herbalism and craniosacral therapy practices, studying somatics and trauma, excavating family history, mapping landscapes of pain and memory, singing, resisting christian hegemony, meditating, remembering dreams, riding my own waves, organizing everything, grieving, reckoning, building home inside my body, surrendering to water, learning how to surf, sweating, shedding skin.

Eva Sweeney is a 30-year-old genderqueer disabled female who works primarily as a freelance writer. Her topics include disabilities and sex, gender, and lesbian culture. She currently lives in L.A. with her two dogs. Performing with Eva are: Willa Mamet who lives in Oakland, where she does bodywork and makes art.  She and Eva were baby queers together in high school. As well as, Animal Prufrock who is a transperformative artist & scholar currently living in San Francisco.

Dale Madison became a host on the QVC Network in 1991. Dale was one of the first employees of the company who sought and received domestic partnership benefits for his lover. Dale was also the first host to produce an all-African themed shopping hour in the world of television shopping. His own line of handmade African dolls sold out in five minutes. He became a nationally recognized doll designer and traveled the country promoting African art. When his contract ended in 1994, he returned to Baltimore and opened the first Afro-Centric Gay themed gift store (some say in the country!)

In 1995 Dale received a Maryland State Council Artist Award for his one-man show, FREEda SLAVE: Mask of a Diva. The show was based on his experiences as a drag queen background extra on the film, “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything Julie Newmar.” The show addressed masculine and feminine discrimination within the gay community. After winning a playwriting award in 1999, Dale took the show to Los Angeles and it won the critic’s pick of the week in Backstage West. After working in various television and film projects, Dale enrolled in college at the age of 47. During his college years he never slowed down, writing and publishing two books and producing two short films. DREAMBOY: My Life as a QVC Host & Other Hits won the Best LGBT film of 2008 at the San Diego Black film festival and The Panty Man was nominated as best short in the 2009 Pan African Film festival. Dale graduated in 2010 with a Master’s degree in education. His second one-man show debuted the following summer to a sold out audience, MY Life in 3 Easy Payments based on his memoirs. In addition, he became a mentor with LifeWorks, a LGBT enrichment youth program. While facilitating performance art workshops at LGBT youth conferences, Dale was asked to become a facilitator of a Black & Latino men’s empowerment program through The LA Gay & Lesbian Center, the largest LGBT organization in the world. Through everything Dale has stayed true to himself living life out and proud inspiring others to do the same.

Rik Haber is a gender queer, trans, chronically ill, artist based in San Francisco. Rik has been performing since he was a tiny one and has always found it to be an outlet for exploring the absurdities of gender and problematic social norms. Rik performed in the National Queer Arts Fest last year and feels thrilled to bring a new piece to this year’s festival with a brilliant cast of other queer, ill identified folks.