Passage and Place | June 1

June 1
Passage & Place
Lex Non Scripta
Alley Cat Books
5pm

Passage & Place is a multimedia visual arts exhibition, book project, and skillshare series that explores displacement & movement, freedom & incarceration, and home & im/migration at the intersection of queerness.

How do our individual and collective bodies affect and politicize the space around them, and how does the space around us affect and politicize our individual and collective bodies? How do our identities inform the way we understand movement/displacement and freedom/confinement? In what ways can coping mechanisms transform into intentional acts of strengthening?

Featured artists include Black Salt Collective’s Sarah Biscarra-Dilley and Grace Rosario Perkins, Paper Buck in collaboration with members of the Transgender, Gender Variant & Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), and Zeph Fishlyn in collaboration with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. Curator Lex Non Scripta and Annah Anti-Palindrome will display a collection of artwork and letters from incarcerated and non-incarcerated queers addressing ideas of and relationships to Home.

For Additional Information: www.facebook.com/events/642278009156915 and lexnonscripta.com/passage-place/

BIOGRAPHIES

ANNAH ANTI-PALINDROME is a 32 year old queer/femme who was raised in the rural, working-class craters at the base of the sierra foothills. She is interested in exploring the ways that her home of origin constructed her early sense of self, as well as the ways that separation from that home (via juvenile detention centers, addiction, rehabilitation clinics, travel and relocation) have displaced her from that original sense of self over time. She is interested in exploring the ways we are often required to reclaim and redefine ourselves as we move (by force orchoice) further away from what we once knew home to be. www.annahantipalindrome.com

SARAH (SASS) BISCARRA-DILLEY is a multi-disciplinary artist, basketweaver, chancla-thrower and member of Black Salt Collective. Her work explores the spaces between the worlds; between blood sickness and bloodlines, between grief and joy, between body and land, between the spatial and the temporal, between personal authority and collective responsibility. She is anchored in the intention and practices of Indigenous decolonization: through cartographic  upheaval, through contradiction, through complexity, through communion. saxtalaqway.tumblr.com

Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and Canada; showcased by MoCNA curator Ryan Rice at the 2012 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association’s (NAISA) annual meeting, presented the Sexuality Studies Association’s keynote lecture at First People’s House, part of the 2013 Congress of Humanities in Victoria, B.C., and awarded, alongside her remarkable co-conjurers Grace Rosario Perkins, Anna Luisa Petrisko and Adee Roberson, the 2014 So/Ex Alternative Exposure grant for the cosmic collaborations of Black Salt Collective. blacksaltcollective.tumblr.com

PAPER BUCK is a printmaker, multimedia visual artist and grassroots organizer currently based in the occupied Ohlone/Chocenyo territories of Oakland, CA. He uses politicized creative projects, collaborative and cross-disciplinary approaches to play at the confluence of traditional visual art production and the work of building social movements. His projects attempt to reckon with the histories of supremacy and oppression we struggle within our societies to transform. Recent works place familial historical narratives into broader socio-political context to explore the development of white supremacy in North America and beyond, and to examine our collective relationships to undoing it’s hold on our societies globally. Drawing on his relationships to queer, feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist projects, he hopes to illuminate transformative potentials across history and futurity. He is the Printmaking Studio Manager at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA, and has been a volunteer at the Transgender, Gender-variant and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), for three years. www.paperbuck.net

ZEPH FISHLYN has worn many hats in the SF Bay Area’s queer, punk, and DIY scenes since the late 80s. Zeph works as a visual artist, object maker, and activist at the intersections of art, social justice, and the transgressive body. From community-based art projects to creative direct action, Zeph is there with a handful of pens, a bicycle, a toolbox, a computer and a can of paint—helping the impossible and the undesirable come to life.

Zeph has worked on many collective projects, most notably the Horizontal Alliance of Very Organized Queers, the Beehive Design Collective, Million Fishes Art Collective, Gold Fish: the Musical, and Maggots and Men (a queer experimental film). www.zephrocious.com

GRACE ROSARIO PERKINS has spent a large chunk of time residing on the Akimel O’odham Indian Reservation (Blackwater AZ) and on the Navajo Nation (Fort Defiance AZ). This upbringing has affected her body of work which consists of repetitive motifs of women, mountainscapes, abstract patterns, and shapes built from a consciousness in which memory, familial identity, pop culture, and obsessive mark making are paired with text.

In 2012, Grace was part of a group of women who founded the Black Salt Collective, a small collective with aims to make work that “embodies cultural and contemporary narratives” and increase the visibility of queer women of color artists. blacksaltcollective.tumblr.com

LEX NON SCRIPTA is a 34 year old, working-class, trans/gender-queer multi-media artist and activist from the shores of the San Francisco Bay. Having lived in over 34 different homes throughout the U.S. over the course of their life, they are interested in exploring the ways that transience and displacement inform how we navigate the world, and how we build, sustain and invest in community.

Lex’s creative focus is heavily informed by social justice/practice/responsibility, transgressive and liberatory politics, and the spirit of collaboration. In addition to exhibiting their work throughout the U.S. as well as in Canada & Mexico, Lex co-founded Aorta Magazine: by/for/about women & queers in the arts, is a former resident of Million Fishes Arts Collective, was co-organizer for the Transformative Arts Practice Space at the 2013 Allied Media Conference (Detroit), and was most recently a participant in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Creative Ecosystem/Body Politic Think Tank. Passage & Place is Lex’s fourth curatorial collaboration for NQAF, after Imagine How Free We Can Get: A Radical Queer Walking Tour of the Mission (2010), Dirtstar: Take Root (2011), and Best Revenge: A Beautiful Fuck You (2012). www.lexnonscripta.com