Queer Prophesies

June 19, 2014
Queer Prophesies
Noelle Duncan
Sub-Mission Art Space
7:30pm

Tickets: $12-20

Queer Prophesies is a prophetic window, a portal into manifold queer futures. With gender expression holograms, musical visions, and stories of our queer descendants, this is a night of performance and visual art exploring queer futures, utopias, and dystopias that resist assimilation and explore the great queer unknown.

Created through a process of crowd-sourcing, Queer Prophesies features the visions and prophetic dreams of queer community members artistically realized by an exceptional cast of queer visual artists and performers including: Annie Danger, San Cha, Lex Non Scripta, MOON RAY RA (Celeste Chan and KB Boyce), Cristy C. Road, Nomy Lamm, Star Amerasu, Julz Hale Mary, BEASTIARY, Sharmi Basu, Oscar Tidd, Coral Short, Angela Gabereau, Sapphic Lasers, Finley Coyl, Paper Buck, Alvis Parsley, Caitlin Rose Sweet, Meg Allen, and more.

BIOGRAPHIES

Annie Danger is a 32-year-old, trans performing artist rooted strong in the Bay Area since 1999. She was born and raised in Albuquerque, NM. Annie is a political artist with a heart of weird, weird fun. She makes interactive performances with radical themes and goofy, trippy, hilarious tropes in an ever-expanding search for the perfect hybrid of the lot. Look out for How to Cook a Frog, currently workshopping and intervening around the Bay Area and the nation on its way to an evening-length performance experience in fall, 2014. Find more about Annie at www.anniedanger.com.

San Cha is a singer/songwriter/producer from the Bay Area. She co-produces Dark Room, a monthly goth/industrial/punk/freak fest party, and is the head mistress of Black Glitter family/record label/production house. She is also a member of the production and performance art group DADDIES PLASTIK. Projected against a back drop of dark synth and soulful tracks, San Cha delves deep into herself to bring you glimpses of her soul. Combining her voice, her body and spirit, her performances grab hold of you and pull you into her world. She doesn’t ask permission, she makes you submit. Think of her as your musical mistress … She’s not asking for your soul, but wants to give you a memory, a longing, a desire for more but be careful you might fall into her black hole.

Her album OFF HER THRONE is available at: elsancha.bandcamp.com Find more information about San Cha here: elsancha.com.

Nomy Lamm is a writer, performer and voice teacher who lives in the Mission. She performs regularly with Sins Invalid, a project that centers queers and people of color doing work around disability, sexuality and social justice. She was part of a team that created “White Lies” for the 2013 NQAF, a collaborative musical theater production exploring impacts of racism in queer communities.  She has an MFA in creative writing from SFSU, and is a recipient of a San Francisco Arts Commission grant to help finish her novel, titled “515 Clues.” A performance based on the novel, called “515 Clues: A Kabbalistic Collabaret,” will be produced as part of the 2014 NQAF.

Cristy C. Road is a Cuban-American Artist and Writer. Blending her political principles, sexual identity, and social inadequacies, Road lives to testify the beauty of the imperfect. Her endeavors in illustrating and publishing began when writing a punk rock zine, Greenzine, for ten years. Greenzine eventually included narratives on race, gender, and eliminating oppression in the punk and activist communities. She resumed to contribute illustrations to countless record album covers, book covers, political organizations, magazine articles, and more. Road has published an illustrated novel about high school, mental health, sexuality, and Miami entitled INDESTRUCTIBLE (Microcosm), a postcard book entitled DISTANCE MAKES THE HEART GROW SICK (Microcosm), and BAD HABITS (Soft Skull), an Illustrated love story about healing, drugs, gay nightlife, and her telepathic connections to the destruction of New York City. Roads work has also been featured in the Baby Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writing Anthology, Live Through This Anthology, Reproduce and Revolt, and countless other published works. She’s toured nationally and internationally on her own, and with SISTER SPIT, an all-queer spoken-word road-show. Her latest novel, SPIT AND PASSION (Feminist Press), is a graphic novel about coming out, maintaining her Cuban cultural roots, and an obsession with Green Day. She is currently working on a TAROT CARD DECK with Author, Michelle Tea and her band, THE HOMEWRECKERS. She hibernates in Brooklyn, NY.

Lex Non Scripta is a cut-paper artist, printmaker, illustrator, activist, and independent curator, with a creative focus heavily informed by social justice/practice/responsibility, transgressive and liberatory politics, and community building. Lex is co-founder of Aorta Magazine: for/by/about women and queers in the arts, former resident artist at Million Fishes Arts Collective, former fellow in the Emerging Arts Professionals SF fellowship program, and proprietor Argot Printshop, with prints that benefit radical, social justice, and community oriented projects and organizations. For the past several years, Lex has focused their energy on creating free, collaboratively-produced, community focused art events, acting as a key organizer for  Bring Your Own Queer/BYOQ: a free art & music festival in 2009 and 2010, the Mission Queer History walking tour in 2010, Dirtstar 2011 in conjunction with the National Queer Arts Festival and Luggage Store Gallery/Tenderloin National Forest, and Best Revenge, a multi-venue, single day spectacular on community resistance that featured 35 artists, musicians, and performers for the NQAF 2012. In July 2011, Lex was awarded a residency at Signal Fire Arts in the Mount Hood National Forest, Oregon. Currently, Lex is on the coordinating committee for the Transformative Arts Practice Space, a hub for creative practice in which participants are invited to examine the roles of artists in intersections of activism, as part of the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, is participating in Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ think tank series — Field of Inquiry: Body Politic, and is curating Passage & Place, an exploration of borders, migration, incarceration, and freedom for NQAF 2014. www.lexnonscripta.com

MOON RAY RA is a collaboration and collage of experimental sound, text, and image. MOON RAY RA creates space/time/travel with KB Boyce and Celeste Chan.

KB Boyce is a Two-Spirit musician whose adventures have brought hir from teenage punk band appearances at CBGBs in NY, to B-grade horror movies in LA, and on to solo Drag King blues performance as TuffNStuff in San Francisco. S/he pays homage to African-American and Indigenous legacies of resistance through art. Boyce is the Co-Founder of Queer Rebels, a queer people of color arts company that connects generations – and honors our queer legacies with art for the future. www.queerrebels.com

Celeste Chan creates work born from Queer Diaspora through wit, words, and film. A Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) literary fellow, her writing is published in As/us literary journal and Feminist Wire. Her films have screened at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, MIX NYC, Frameline, and National Queer Arts Festival, among others. She’s honored to be the Co-Founder of Queer Rebels (a queer of color arts company), with her partner, KB Boyce. For more info: www.celestechan.com and www.facebook.com/QRProductions.

Star Amerasu has been a performer from the womb. This young, intelligent woman, started out telling stories, learning to read and write at just two years old. This child began her performing life, reading books aloud. Taking this intelligence she was able to skip some grades and graduate at seventeen. Star began singing as a child, in primary school choir. She went to a Fine Arts Academy for her high school days. After graduating, she attended Cornish College of the Arts on a Scholarship. She then left the school and landed herself here in San Francisco. She has performed many different roles, crossing gender boundaries.

Caitlin Rose Sweet
is the child of back-to-land hippies from South Eastern Ohio and grew up immersed in the 1970’s craft revival movement. After graduating from Ohio University with her BFA in Sculpture and minor in Women’s Studies, she moved to the West Coast. During her time in the Bay Area she regularly showed in alternative galleries and warehouses that have all been consumed by gentrification and curated exhibitions for the National Queer Arts Festival and GLBT Historical Society. Recent collaboratively curated shows include: Best Revenge: A Beautiful Fuck You, Take Root, and The Deep Lez Potluck and Performance Night. Her work is influenced by queer theory, lesbian science fiction novels from the 80s, witchcraft and finger banging. Sweet is in her second year of her MFA in Applied Craft and Design program from PNCA and OCAC in Portland, Oregon.

Sapphic Lasers is a queer-as-fuck, dapper punk long-haired butch/boi with country roots and a citified mouth and is one half of queer electro band, GAYmous. She is a songwriter/musician and performer with over 17 years of experience in composition and performance, both solo and in groups. Her music has been featured on MTV’s Road Rules, XLR8R.com, KAWL, KPFA, KPSU in Portland, The SF Bay Guardian’s “Noise” music blog, The SF Chronicle’s “Off the Record” blog, SFStation.com, Berkeley Community Media TV, and has recently been licensed in Kink.com’s Foot Worship: Lesbian Footdance film and Barbarella feature, as well as Scary Cow Production’s Up and Out. As frontperson of Bay Area band, Elle Niño, SL was selected as a finalist for the San Francisco Music Video Race in 2012. In 2013, she was commissioned to write and perform a hymn for Annie Danger’s acclaimed performance art piece, The Church of the Holy Fuck presented at CounterPulse. SL was selected as a featured performer for the 2013 Butch Voices conference in Oakland, the largest annual gathering of masculine-of-center queers coming together to explore issues that affect masculine-of-center communities.

Sharmi Basu is currently an MFA student at Mills College in the Electronic Music and Recording Arts department. Born in Oakland and raised in the Bay Area, she attempts to catalyze a political, yet ethereal aesthetic through combining her anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts. Beast Nest, Sharmi’s primary performing project, utilizes an unwavering depression & restrained horror to channel left-eyed spirits. While simultaneously clearing and entering, the sewage pipes of the body and the patriarchy congeal into watery soundscapes as a vehicle for achieving liberation through the darkest of fears.

Oscar Tidd was born and raised in the East Bay. They research movement and movements.

 

 

 

 

Julz Hale Mary is a San Francisco based multi-media artist from Fresno, CA. Through satirical improvisation, portrait photography and highly stylized videos, they create work which disrupts and complicates capitalist narratives. Their role play, acting and editing remains critical yet distorted in order to compliment their absurdist perspective. Diving into the hegemony of mainstream values, Julz Hale Mary often exaggerates their appearance to expose the disgusting quality of microaggressions, as well as the humorous absurdity of tradition. In June, they will be showing a series of black and white portraits displaying the scrutinized bodies of “Fat, Queers”. They are currently working on a revenge film screenplay about nonbinary surgery, and a self-portrait series about white supremacy and domestic violence.

Finley Coyl draws and paints ridiculous and obscene tableaux and portraits depicting individuals in worlds they inhabit and worlds they express. Coyl’s images combine large-scale layered illustrations, patterns, and found objects on bodies intersecting in fantastic orientations. Coyl creates artwork for installations, prints and drawings, books and zines, and performance, and currently works in the Bay Area.

 

Alvis Parsley is an artist, performer, writer, and researcher based in Toronto. They are the founder of Fantasy is Reality Unlimited (FiRU). Their work had been presented at the SummerWorks Festival, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Rhubarb Festival, Radical Queer Semaine, Meow Mix, Qouleur, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, Mayworks Festival, and the Heels on Wheels Roadshow.

Alvis serves on the Programming Committee of Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival and the working collective of Whippersnapper Gallery. They have been selected as a finalist of Toronto Arts Foundation’s Newcomer Artist Award and have received grants and mentorship from Diaspora Dialogues, Neighbourhood Arts Network, Jumblies Theatre, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the British Council. Their project Chinatown Community Think Tank was featured on CBC Radio, Rabble.ca and Fairchild Television. Alvis’ curatorial work was presented at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche, Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff), Studio10 (NYC), Seoul International New Media Festival, Estonian Academy of Arts, Arad Art Museum, National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Saint Petersburg), the Australasian Cooperative Research Centre for Interaction Design (Brisbane), Osage Gallery (Hong Kong), and Videotage (Hong Kong) where they served as Assistant Manager from 2009 to 2011. https://alvischoi.wordpress.com/.

Aubrey Heichemer is sound artist who uses situation, community and performance to communication thought structures and parallel meaning. She is currently living in Berlin producing music under the name Cult Casual. She has had worked featured at: The Shanghai conservatory, Shanghai (CO), King Kong Gallery, The Hague (NL), Artists Colony, Gdansk (PL), Week of Work Festival, Vooruit, Gent (BL), Dla Gallery, Torun (PL), Touch 10, Tag, Today’s Art Festival, The Hague (NL) , Intro, Maastricht (NL),Fisch Fabrik, Berlin (DE), Faktion, San Francisco (US), Pow Pow Perfomance Art Festival, San Francisco (US) Flux Ensemble, Oakland (US),Our Lady of Flowers, Denver (US) Opera in III parts, Ozean Gallery, Berlin (DE)

Paper Buck is a printmaker, multimedia visual artist and grassroots organizer currently based in the occupied Ohlone/Chocenyo territories of Oakland, CA. He is interested in politicized creative projects that use socially collaborative and cross-disciplinary approaches to play at the confluence of traditional and innovative technical processes while participating in 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.

Tyrone Boucher is an organizer, facilitator, and artist currently based in Austin, Texas. He is a self-taught printmaker and illustrator whose work is inspired by queer resilience, collective liberation, interdependence, social justice movements, and community.

 

Meg Allen was born in San Francisco in 1978. Though she’s been taking pictures as a hobby since age 14, it took her until October of 2012 to embrace her passion of photography and take her vision seriously. To see more of what she shoots, check out her website at megallenstudio.com.

Angela Gabereau and Coral Short, collaborators. Angela Gabereau will bring her tech wizardry to the Future Visions project to create the web application similar to a kinetic tarot card spread. She is a software developer and artist who works in craft, code and electronics. She is currently employed at Wyld Collective, an interactive design studio and Fabule, an open hardware startup. She also teaches a weekly programming class for artists at the Eastern Block, a new media gallery and hackerspace. After completing a B.Comp.Sci in Computation Arts from Concordia University, she continued to work there as a research assistant at Obx Labs. She’s spent the last few years sharpening her software architecture chops in various Montreal start-ups. http://angelagabereau.com/

Coral Short has been creating radical multimedia collaborations, large group performances and curations for 15 years on three continents. Her practice casts magic spells on her audiences enabling them to understand that many fantastical realities can and do happen at any given moment. Short has many beloved people, communities, and locations that she calls home. Short and her countless projects move at the speed of light; ironically she is the most still when she travels. Her latest artist residencies have been at Dirt Palace in Providence Rhode Island and IDA in Tennessee. Coral has been making a video a week for a year here: http://www.52pickupvideos.com/HTML/Short_grid.html

BEASTIARY is the intermedia performance project of the paradoxically hopeful misanthrope, Rai Yin Hsu.  A psychedelic journey of the senses into magic, horror, and meditation, BEASTIARY weaves and waves the noises in-between, the multidimensional facets of personal and political struggle, healing, and transmutation within a world torn apart by illusion.

Kat Marie Yoas (Kat is collaborating with Caitlin Rose Sweet, so you can add her as a collaborator under Caitlin’s description): Kat Marie Yoas is a writer, comedic healer, candle maker, actor, magic sharer, performance and video artist and working class femme smart ass and sweet heart living in San Francisco. Her essays and stories have been published in anthologies, graphic comics and zines. She’s performed her stories and characters on stages, at colleges, bars, theaters and bookstores across the USA, Europe and the UK with her queer literary families, Sister Spit and the Moon Babes.  Kat Marie is artist in residence at The Garage and creates one woman shows and collaborative comedic adventures called “lady comedy” with Ben McCoy.  She has had residences with the RADAR Lab in Akumal, Mexico and through AIRSpace.  She is currently at work on her first novel about Michigan and the notions of home we battle and embrace, her next one woman show (A Lesbian’s Guide to Self Care) and a collaborative performance series. Kat Marie also has created a line of hand made candles and an intuitive counseling candle experience called STEVIE WICKS, which is all about celebrating femininity in all sorts of forms, memory and healing.

Gracia Logue-Sargeant: Gracia is a singer/songwriter from Austin, Texas. She is currently performing under project name Bone Orchard Holler. She has worked in collaboration with many different people over the years in her travels around the United States and South America but since drifting into Oakland 2 years ago with 50 bucks, a dog and a truck she has been doing her damnedest to play shows in almost exclusively queer spaces. Gracia has been part of several radical queer collaborations including being a Holy Fucker in the choir of  Reverend Annie Danger’s Church of the Holy Fuck (fuck yea) and performing alongside local Oakland artists such as I Scream You Scream, Thunder Thighs, Sarah Rose, Asixtwo Generator and Annah Antipalindrome. She is currently directly involved with planning and executing community driven shows promoting local and touring queer musicians and performers at Three Walls Gallery in Oakland where she is also a co-curator for Queer Art Dance Party Oaktown. She is a mega babe who likes to sing of deep, deep feelings and of course….love and magic. Her devastatingly handsome sweetie of 3 + years is head over heels in love with her (the feeling being mutual, darlin’) and will probably get wasted and sing all the words to her songs at her next show. The future looks positively shiny.