TBA:25 Dailies
Reflections by Ryan-Ashley A. Maloney
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TBA:25 Dailies / Freddie Robins
by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney//| Include on Home Page, TBA:25Apotropaic at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College
[ All photos in this post, Ryan-Ashley A. Maloney ]
There’s nothing like looking at art your partner would love to soften the edges of a disagreement and diminish the importance of reaching a clear resolution—a resolution which, in my case, would include my husband telling me that I was right.
I don’t even remember what the disagreement was about.
But it was Sunday, September 14th and TBA:25 had, effectively, come to an end. I planned to visit the Cooley in the afternoon, after resting. If I could get enough rest. While I wouldn’t change anything about how many performances I attended during the festival, the crash that follows so much social stimulation is inevitable, and I mostly wanted to stay in bed.
But then the disagreement I can’t remember took place in the afternoon and the only thing I could think to do that might break my looping thoughts was to take my pickup for a drive (it was sunny) and play music too loudly with the windows down. I’m not the sort of person to just drive to drive, though—too wasteful for my constitution—so I drove to Reed.
In the same way that I’ve never looked up a person before an interview or first date, I also don’t research artists I’m unfamiliar with before going to see their work for the first time. It’s rare these days, with search engines and social media, to have a pure experience of anything and I relish the opportunity. So, when I walked into the Cooley to see Robins’ work for the first time, I had no idea where the artist lived, how old they might be, what gender they identified as, or what they did for work (if something other than art).
I was immediately struck by three things: how clearly the work communicated a sense of joy and unselfconscious curiosity; how much conversation there was between made and found objects (including salvaged items like cardboard boxes); and the uncanny way that the parts of the show felt both old and new, expert and naive, devised and improvised—contradictions that I believe are most often found in people with the confidence either of youth or experience, not so much in the in-between.
I noticed the rocks and shells stitched into rows of garter and imagined my own rock collection, my own pile of knitting, my colander filled with freshly rinsed seashells; saw the ways the cardboard was being used, and thought of the boxes I’d been planning to make but hadn’t started yet, for fear they might not be perfect enough (why should they be perfect, I wondered?); and admired the use of ‘office objects’—I love a steel binder clip and collect them myself, along with vintage clothespins, fountain pens, and pencil sharpeners among other things.
I still didn’t know where the artist lived, how old they might be, what gender they identified as, or what they did for work (if something other than art). I wished my partner was there with me because he would love this. Bennie and Clementine, whom I’d never met before, told me about the upcoming talk, the knit-in, offered me some exhibition catalogues, and asked me about my work—who I am, what I’m interested in, how I heard about the show.It’s not often I have such a warm, human-feeling experience at an exhibition space or art event.
Isn’t that odd? Why so much gatekeeping so much of the time around things that are made for everyone, intended so often to foster or communicate connection? Territorialism over access to something public—the making of something public, private—is confounding.
The weather was dreary the night of the artist talk a couple weeks later and, as somebody who is always looking for reasons not to leave the house, it took everything I had to muster the enthusiasm to venture out. Although I love artist’s talks, I almost always regret attending because nine out of ten times, the proceeding Q&A sessions are unbearable—so many people raising their hands not to ask generous and generative questions that allow everybody in the room to learn something more about the artist and their practice, but rather to go on about themselves—leaving me feeling torn between leaving during the Q&A (which always feels a bit rude) and sitting through it despite mounting anger.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy is teaching me about half smiles (which give me the look of a milk-drowsy toddler but actually did help me feel calmer during the germination of a road rage incident yesterday) and open hands, so I’m going to try to use that technique next time I feel my blood pressure rising during narcissistic audience member monologues.
Spoiler—the Q&A following Robins’ talk was spectacular. But we’re not there yet.
My husband and I decide to brave the mildly uncomfortable weather to go hear the talk.
We walk into Eliot Hall, a gorgeous chapel neither of us have been to before, and scan the room to see if we can figure out which person is Freddie. We can’t. What we notice, though, is that the room is absolutely packed. It’s humming warmly and there are several faces I know. There’s emotion in the room. The anticipation of grief. The air pregnant with goodbye.
I don’t know if what I’m feeling is inside of or outside of me, if I’m experiencing sensitive awareness or personal reflection pricked by the meditative murmuring all around.
Stephanie Snyder, the curator of this show and also the Cooley Director, begins thanking people—long-time colleagues, peers, and friends—for all the ways they have supported her along this journey, a portion of which, apparently, ends tonight.
She says something like, “This will be the last one these talks that I give here.”
I feel a rare moment of belonging. Collective grief. Grief. A familiar feeling. A thing I know what to do with. I’m transported to my single digit years in rural North Carolina.
My mother believed it made her look like a good mother to take me to church once in a while, but she didn’t enjoy it and never wanted to go somewhere she’d be recognized. So she’d pick a church at random one miserable Sunday a month, we’d get dressed up she and I, and we’d go. Always a guest, never a member.
I hated these Sundays, which marked the imposition of scratchy tights and my loathsome special occasion patent-leather Mary Janes, and I’d kick and scream the whole way. Then, once we were there and settled, the pastor or preacher or minister or priest (we were denomination-agnostic) always began by asking for a show of hands by first-time visitors. My mother always raised hers, enjoying the attention and warmth from people who hadn’t gotten to know her yet. A familiar feeling. Fleeting.
But this one time, she chose a church whose congregation happened to be in mourning because it was the preacher’s last sermon—the last one of a thirty some year career of shepherding and leading and mentoring and sharing grief.
The job of the curator is not so different from this, I think.
Everyone wore black, the sermon was about transitions, and there were so many tears. And for the first time, I didn’t want to leave. On the way home, I said to my mother, “I really liked that church; I think we should become members.”
She burst out laughing because loss was my reason for loving it. She told this story for years, any time she was trying to illustrate my particular brand of morbidity to a therapist, teacher, or, when I got older, a lover.
And here I am, all these years later, with my husband in a chapel full of people, realizing that what had been so alluring in that church all those years before, was a feeling of ease. Grief is disarming. There’s no energy for judgment or divisiveness or performativity and nobody expects anybody else to be any one way. The masks fall and postures relax, and vulnerable, complex, messy humans emerge.
I wonder if A.I.-driven surveillance technology has trouble with face recognition in a crowd full of grieving people—faces all more slack or scrunched than usual, people as themselves rather than their selves.
Stephanie’s and Kris Cohen’s introductions were ones of care, warmth, and holding—perfect prefaces to Robins’ talk, whose practice seems to be rooted in an ethos located at the intersection of preservation, compulsion, ardour, and slowness. Robins’ love for the apparently unloveable (I’m thinking about the little knitted stuffies she chagrins to collect), melts me.
Notes I made during the talk:
unapologetically soft
“softness is power”
interrogate intersection of art and craft
human condition?
textile art ≠ women’s work
fairy tale … fairy introduction
independent contemporary woman “coded knitting”
mother liked to “get out”
mother collected but didn’t make things
role of the artist …
useful _____ for someone who doesn’t fit in
knitting = mother in itself
“knitting form of expression”
compulsion to knit =
comfort + confrontation
big fan of underdog
bilateral rhythmic psychosocial intervention
[Church
wasn’t gonna go
sleep institute
thesis revelation
chapel/goodbye’s]
Freddie Oct. 7
[Holding the tears]
domestic arts always have to be justified—”women’s work” → must be useful/helpful
internalized low status
women …
difficult until you can do it well
its own language
“cast on”
knitting burned … after spell???
[wiccan aunt
stolen books
barnes & noble
the craft … (the movie)]
[shaman
white wolf
black bear]
[“eye work” eye color change]
[original thought, a younger artist—someone not yet ruined by the world—a willingness to use whatever is around, a confidence with out earned self-consciousness]
horse cemetery
drawing as recording
[What if I could teach here one day? Jesus, why did I get “Fuck Off!” tattooed on my knuckles??]
“the artist as collector”
book? film?
everyday/overlooked
underrated/untouched
Mike Kelly → abject art
memorial 2012
“negating joy”/positive misery
sinister + sad
alone, unobserved
“farmmage”
poop?
[Went to the show in the first place to escape an argument with my husband (I can’t remember what we were disagreeing about—probably my fault)
imagine…sitting in that softness]
the hand in work
[my angry great-grandmother]
rubber glove with knitted cuff
better/worse
knitter
machine?
experimentation / risk ≠ youth
ex: time during Covid
she was teaching online
I realize that there aren’t specific notes about the content of the talk. That’s because my note-taking practice is more about capturing shimmers, noticing moments that make me ‘go’ places, and responding. There is much available on the big wide web about Freddie Robins’ work and practice, written by much more talented arts writers than myself, and I encourage you to go read them all.
Learn more about Freddie Robins here.
[ABOUT THE ARTIST]
(via PICA’s website)
Freddie Robins’ practice crosses definable categories of art, craft and design. She combines these elements elegantly, and with playful wit subverts meaning and making, fusing a melting-pot of approaches to ‘craft’.
She uses knitting to explore pertinent contemporary issues of the domestic, gender and the human condition, as well as the cultural preconceptions surrounding knitting as craft. Her work aims to disrupt the notion of the medium as passive and benign. Her pieces often incorporate both humour and fear. There is also a display of almost obsessive perfectionism in the quality of each piece’s hand-made finish.
Freddie Robins’ work is in several private and public collections, including the Government Art Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Crafts Council, Nottingham Castle Museum, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Scotland and Kode, Bergen, Norway. She has exhibited internationally, including most recently, History in the Making: stories of materials and makers, 2000 BC – Now, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK; If Not Now, When? Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain, 1960 – 2022, Hepworth Wakefield and Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; I Put a Spell on You – New Magic and Mysticism, Art Exchange, University of Essex, Colchester, UK; Creature Comforts, JGM Gallery, London, UK; Kette und Schuss, Mönchengladbach, Germany; CC binder, Puurs-Sint-Amands, Puurs, Belgium; and We are Commoners: Creative Acts of Commoning, a Craftspace national touring exhibition.
Currently Professor of Textiles at the Royal College of Art, Robins is the 2025 Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Visual Arts Program, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR. She lives and works in Essex, UK and London, UK.
TBA:25 Dailies / Day #4
by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney//| TBA:25The Untitled Native Project
by Brutis Baez, Amber Kay Ball, Trevino Brings Plenty, Leland Butler, Olivia Camfield, Robert Franklin, David Harrelson, Anthony Hudson, Woodrow Hunt, LaRonn Katchia, Steph Littlebird, Kanani Miyamoto
Time-Based Art Festival by Portland Institute of Contemporary Art
Sunday, September 6th
[reflections provided by Ryan-Ashley Anderson Maloney]
Unlike so many of the other performances featuring one or a couple artists performing solo, and/or in partnership, this evening was a compendium of creative projects and performances, each one involving many moving parts and, often, entire teams of people. Therefore, I don’t think the reflection style I’ve used while covering TBA:25 up to this point is quite right here. Additionally, it was quite dark, so my preferred method of note-taking wasn’t available to me. But even without notes, I find myself returning to so many moments throughout the evening—moments of joy, of grief, of heartbreak, embodiment, and community—and I think the best way to honor the energy put forth is to simply present the list of artists with links to their projects along with concise, affectual reflections which might help direct you to your own areas of interest.
[ Photo, Robert Franklin ]
Brutis Baez (Warm Springs/Wasco/Paiute)
Film director; Musician; Writer; Producer; Actor; Mentor; Operations Manager, KWSO Radio in Warm Springs
Brutis’ Films | Brutis’ Video & Music (Bigg B) Projects | Brutis’ Instagram | KWSO
Accessible, gregarious, kind, my first thought when Brutis took the stage was, I bet everybody who spends time with him leaves feeling good. A film-maker, music-maker, community-maker, language-maker, who seems as passionate about making work as he is about making work with other people, about mentoring and sharing and passing knowledge freely.
He talks about film production, past and current projects, and shows us a joyful satire(?), a two-minute film he directed, SPAM is Life— “A short film produced by the youth of the Warm Springs Community Action Team about the gathering of every Native’s first food—SPAM.”
Amber Kay Ball (Dakubetede, Shasta, Modoc, Klamath)
Artist; Advocate; Theatre Maker
Amber’s Theatre Work | Amber’s Visual Art | Amber’s Instagram | KWSO
Self-described as a “theatre maker, visual artist, and community-based advocate. As a contemporary Native multi-practice artist, Amber uses theatre, multimedia, and beadwork as mediums for sharing stories, truths, laughter and joy. These mediums allow them to critically explore, honor, and weave Native pasts, presents, and futures in a just and liberated format. Amber studied theater arts and Native American Studies at the University of Oregon where they were able to study theatrical arts abroad in London, England.”
Another artist for whom mentorship and community intersect squarely at the center of their arts practice.
Trevino Brings Plenty (Lakota)
Poet; Musician; Archivist; Meme Maker
Trevino’s Books | Trevino’s Memes | Trevino’s Instagram | Trevino’s X Account | Trevino’s Pretendian Article Archive
From his website: “Trevino is an American and Native American; a Lakota Indian born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA. Some of his work explores the American Indian identity in American culture and how it has through genealogical history affected indigenous peoples in the 21st century. He writes of urban Indian life; it’s his subject.”
Before highlighting the next artist, I want to talk about memes for a minute. And also about the collective pressure to categorize every mundane thing ever since (seemingly) social media shifted to being all about algorithms. Algorithms rely on categorization, and categorizing/naming one’s content results in more eyeballs (read surveillance). We have been trained to prize commodification and reach over privacy and safety.
I mention this naming/categorizing thing because, in the same way that calling a thing what it is doesn’t make that thing special, meme-ifying something doesn’t make it clever. You have to actually be clever to make words on a photo funny.
I continue to be baffled by the see-say nature of media these days. It manufactures the compulsion to perpetuate hashtag-ified nomenclatures to describe and therefore commodify even the most ordinary things — #GirlBoss, the name for a woman in a leadership role; #MomLife, to indicate that the content is made my a mom who is alive and doing things; #dogsofinstagram, pictures of dogs posted on Instagram, etc. — and I struggled to understand the purpose of the word ‘meme’ for, well, a very long time.
Look at this meme—we should do something like this for our client—colleagues would say in the social media ‘fishbowl’ of the big Tennessee ad-agency I worked at, and then show me a photo with a try-hard caption overlay. It’s a good thing I have botox now. I should have then. My face’s responses were real loud, even though what came out of my mouth was, simply, “Hmm, something to consider.”
I was so frustrated by what I considered the unnecessary naming and categorization of a thing humans have been doing since time immemorial—making clever ha-ha’s out of everyday things (hello, New Yorker cartoons)—that, for a long time, I refused to even call a meme by its name. Instead, I would called it a captioned photo. Yes, I was stubborn. And it wasn’t until I began noticing trends of captioned photos being created for specifically activist storytelling narratives that my perspective began shifting. I started separating what I considered dumb and pointless memes into the ‘captioned photo’ or ‘infographic’ (I hate this word as much as I hate ‘listicle’) categories, and captioned photos which seemed to act as accessible modes of storytelling whose composition intersected at the center of art, pop culture, language, and criticism, into the ‘meme’ category. Trevino Brings Plenty’s memes about Pretendians falls into the latter. Not that it’s up to me to gatekeep the word ‘meme,’ but I feel like a name is something to rise to and too many captioned photos just don’t.
One of my favorite Trevino memes is of a white man in a corporate blue oxford shirt? jacket? with a big smile on his face, looking very ‘wholesome,’ surrounded by forest animals. The caption overlay reads, HOW THE PRETENDIAN SEES THEMSELVES AND EXPECTS YOU TO SEE THEM, and gives very hunter-as-Bambi’s bestie vibes.
The meme format allows for the communication of big, often critical, ideas, quickly and easily and in a lighthearted way, and I think the ‘lighthearted’ part is key here because self-reflection is almost never the result when the vehicle of a message is ill-humored judgment or overt disdain. Disdain but make it fun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For the record, Wikipedia states that a meme is:
“… an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.” [emphasis mine]
What of Trevino’s meme work, which is utilizing this unit for carrying cultural ideas…with a mimicked theme to interrogate the idea of mimicry? Picture a picture of somebody standing in front of a mirror, with a mirror behind them, reflections reflecting into eternity. Picture the GIF (another thing I find strange is naming an entire category of short, looping videos, by, simply, their file type—in that case, why not call all static images ‘jpegs’ or whatever, instead of ‘photos’?) of the science-y looking guy floating in space making the “brain blown” motion with the galaxy expanding behind him.
Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I feel like leveraging this ‘unit’ of mimicry as the vehicle for interrogating mimicry is, like, total genius. Much smarter than the photos my colleagues used to send me which pictured anybody doing anything with a me/also me caption overlay in an attempt to cleverly communicate that people can be two things at the same time. Classic tropes in the me/also me category include diet culture (me: on a diet / also me: shoving cake in my mouth); relationship styles (me: not codependent / also me: thinking you don’t love me when you leave me on read); and consumerism (me: I’m broke! / also me: swiping a credit card); among other things like racism, sexism, all matter of phobias, politics, etc., etc., etc., etc etc etcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetceetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetce
Point being, mimicry done with intention/interrogation = art
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Leland Butler (Grand Ronde, Siletz, and Yurok)
Photographer; Artist
About Leland Butler | Leland’s Instagram
I’m always thrilled when somebody who seems easygoing and polite comes out of the gate with challenging and provocative art. The video performance piece that Leland shared—a combination of self-portraiture, contextual imagery, and title cards displaying messages like “free Palestine”—felt determined, unrelenting, hungry. It was disquieting in the most thrilling way.
“Leland Butler (Grand Ronde/Siletz/Yurok) is a photographer and artist. Curiosity about self, land, and people led Butler to photography a decade ago. His sophisticated and often mysterious compositions explore the duality of light and shadow. Butler is the recipient of the 2024 Indigenous Place Keeping Artist Fellowship.” – Bio via PICA’s website
Olivia Camfield (Mvskoke)
Multimedia Movement Artist; Filmmaker
About Olivia Camfield | Olivia’s Instagram | Olivia’s Performance Work | Olivia’s Films
What came to mind for me: finding beauty in what stifles; domestic objects as totems; making magic from the mundane; using the body as a seer—a prophet sending messages through movement.
Re: their website: Their work finds connection of dance as body horror, tattooing as protection spells, and farming as Queer Indigenous Futurism.
David Harrelson (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde)
Storyeller; THPO Program Manager
David’s Professional contact
“David Harrelson is the Cultural Resources Department Manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. He is a Grand Ronde tribal member from the Bean-Menard-Sengretta family. He was raised by a mountaineer and grandparents who worked in education and health care. Among his lineal Oregon ancestors of recent memory he counts the owner of a logging company, a mobile butcher, chief of police, and Kalapuya headman. David is active in his community and currently serves on the Oregon State Advisory Committee for Historic Preservation (SACHP) as well as the Oregon Arts Commission. He is a former board member of the Chehalem Cultural Center in Newberg, OR, and has previously been a conversation leader for Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project, where he led sessions on the topics of monuments and place. Working for over ten years in the field of cultural resources, David continues to champion the protection of archaeology sites, maintenance of ancestral lifeways, and proliferation of indigenous art forms throughout his Tribe’s homelands centered in Western Oregon.” – Bio via PICA’s website
David’s talk began with the reading of a historical timeline, but quickly transformed into a more conversational interaction with the audience. To conclude his portion of the evening, David performs a song—a chant—which began a capella, eventually building momentum with the sound of accompanying drums and other instruments in the background. At the end, what I originally mistook for a backing track, was revealed as a group of live musicians who entered the main space from behind the closed door of the annex.
I think the ‘backing track’ as a theme of cultural appropriation is critical. (Thinking about Indiginaeity as a ‘backing track’ for Disney, etc.)
Anthony Hudson (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and Siletz)
Performance Artist; Writer
Anthony’s Website | Anthony’s Writing | Anthony’s Video Work
Anthony Hudson MC’d the evening as the beloved Carla Rossi. She was in full fashion, sporting a selection of precious bowl cut wigs in a variety of colors, and multiple hip-length jackets which, combined with the bowl cuts, had me yearning for a fashion moment that either never existed or, which I tragically missed while trying to hairspray my bangs upright in the rural American South. Back then, my hair was straight as a pin if you can believe it. And a little bit blonde.
What is that feeling? The feeling of nostalgia for something that hasn’t yet happened—nostalgia for a future beyond a horizon you can’t quite make out … is this the stuff of magical thinking? Of world-building? I typed nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened into Duck Duck Go (because FUCK Google!) and this is what I found:
The comment about a desire to connect with “a past that you never could have experienced” gestures a little too pointedly, for me, toward appropriation and fetishization. Enter, Trevino’s Pretendian memes.
“One thing’s for sure: nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” – Hugo
Woodrow Hunt (Klamath, Modoc and Cherokee)
Artist; Filmmaker; Founder of Tule Films
Woodrow’s Stories from the River Series | Tule Films
LaRonn Katchia (Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute)
Director; Cinematographer; Editor; Associate Programmer/Advisor/Juror for the Indigenous Films Program at the Oscar-qualifying Bend Film Festival
LaRonn’s Website | LaRonn’s Video Work | LaRonn’s Instagram
“LaRonn Katchia is a director, cinematographer, and editor. Some of LaRonn’s achievements include: Shooting and editing PBS’s Roadtrip Nation: Native Way Forward, a behind the scenes segment for FX’s hit show Reservation Dogs, both projects in collaboration with Ryan Redcorn and Buffalo Nickel Creative.
LaRonn is also the Associate Programmer/Advisor/Jury for the Indigenous Films Program at the Oscar-qualifying Bend Film Festival. Recently, LaRonn and Bendfilm director Todd Looby hosted acting legends Gary Farmer & Tatanka Means, showcasing their work alongside the Warm Springs tribal membership.
Today, in collaboration with the Warm Springs Community Action Team, LaRonn is working on his first feature documentary about the transformation of a 125 year old, historic Commissary Building as it is moved and restored into a small business incubator to serve tribal entrepreneurs on the Warm Springs Reservation.” – Bio from PICA’s website
Steph Littlebird (Kalapuya, Chinook)
Artist; Curator; Writer; Illustrator
Steph’s Website | Steph’s Gallery | Book, My Powerful Hair | Steph’s Instagram
Like Brutis, Steph’s energy was warm, welcoming, and she had a great sense of humor. A prolific art maker, Steph is working on a children’s book, maintains a fine art practice, and also creates digital illustration work which “often examines issues related to Native identity, cultural resilience, and responsible land ownership.” The part of her talk that stuck with me most was when she shared a sampling of her activist artwork—bright illustrations featuring figures based on Disney characters, based on actual Indigenous people, which subvert the sunny stories Disney would have us believe about our country, telling stories instead of appropriation, exploitation, and colonialism.
There’s something of the meme here, in the activist approach to using mimicry and visual storytelling to communicate complex ideas, lightly. If you go to Steph’s Instagram page, you’ll see a few of my favorites—a bastardized “Land O Fakes” (took me a few glances to realize it didn’t say Land O Lakes) package; several comic-like short conversation clips between Steph’s version of Disney’s Pocahontas and John Smith, Pocahontas sussing John whose cluelessness is almost pitiable; and even a figurative graph which corrects Disney’s incorrect (and incredible inappropriate) characterization of Pocahontas as an adult woman with sexual agency at the time that she met John Smith. In fact, the very period of her life that Disney’s film claims to represent would only be accurately portraying Pocahontas if she were illustrated as a 10-12 year old child. This is less about the problematics of Disney, though—the Disney story is just a vehicle for delivering the painful message that the over-sexualization of Native Women leads to catastrophically high instances of sexual violence and murder.
Kanana Miyamoto (Hawaiian)
Artist; Primtmaker; Teacher; Curator; p:ear Arts Coordinator
Kanani’s Instagram | p:ear
“Important to Miyamoto’s work as an artist is sharing and honoring her mixed cultural background to represent her community and the beauty of intersectional identities. She also explores topics such as institutional critique and hopes to create critical conversations around cultural authenticity in the arts. Miyamoto is a printmaker and uses traditional printmaking techniques to create large scale print installations and murals. In addition to being a practicing artist, she is an advocate for art education and a passionate community worker.” – Bio via PICA’s website
Kanani’s talk centered around the commodification of symbols, highlighting the appropriation of Tiki culture by two iconic Portland bars—The Alibi and Hale Pele. She read from drink menus she had created based on real menus, and riffed on the absurdity of cultural symbols so white-washed.
***
Themes of iteration and mimicry as activist modalities ran through several of these artists’ work and the sharpness of the criticality left an impression. I left wanting more—more from our politicians, more from our institutions, and more than land acknowledgements, the performativity of which leave a taste like tin in my mouth every time I hear them.
But no use in spending energy on the wailings of a white sympathizer who isn’t doing much herself to change the status quo. Because, how embarrassing of me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I did manage to capture a few notes on the left despite the dark, here. The page on the right is filled with notes from a meeting the following day about my thesis project but, at first, I couldn’t tell that it was from a different occasion. I love when that happens—when I can’t tell where one thing stops and another begins.
Learn more about all the artists involved in The Untitled Native Project here.
TBA:25 Dailies / Day #3
by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney//| TBA:25Time-Based Art Festival by Portland Institute of Contemporary Art
Saturday, September 5th
[reflections provided by Ryan-Ashley Anderson Maloney]
The Brutal Joy: A Lecture, lecture/performance by Justine A. Chambers
[ Photo still from video, Flick Harrison ]
A year into grad school, I still didn’t understand the real purpose of “citation.”
I mean, I understood it to be a thing I needed to do when referencing and synthesizing the work and thoughts of others. A thing which was designed to credit sources and required formatting of things like footnotes and bibliographies. A thing which required me to, I thought, work systematically rather than intuitively.
Giving credit brings me joy, but the academia of it all made a chore of something I didn’t yet understand could be a practice—a generous and life-giving practice of creating and thinking and making in a way that is, foundationally, in conversation with those others creating the world around and with me.
I was troubled by my inability to conceptualize something that my colleagues seemed to understand intuitively. Troubled until I remember that autism affects the way I process figurations. To conceptualize a word that evokes footnotes and bibliographies (the creation of which, a process, historically, has been as daunting as taxes) foreclosed on my ability to see it differently, to see it as a meaningful and integral ingredient of an authentically conversational art practice which centers not the contrived labor of “agreement seeking” but rather, deeply generative research that produces resonances and forms connective tissue in the body that contains us all.
I was writing about my own ideas and experiences and theories about phenomena like groupthink and the manosphere, and the mushy space of third wave feminism and felt pressure to “ground” my ideas in the work of others. Although I was already gleefully reading and talking about From Margin to Center by bell hooks, Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria, and Girl on Girl by Sophie Gilbert (among others), I was right here and my mind had them “over there.” I just couldn’t see how we were really all together, in the room, talking to each other and how, in fact, there’s nothing I could say about any of that had they not already said so much.
And then I started reading Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe and People I’ve Met from the Internet by Stephen Van Dyke (thank you Jay Ponteri and Cole Cohen) and thinking about the idea of “intellectual elders.” I re-read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. I attended a talk and reading by Lucy Cotter at Stelo, and then attended Bean Gilsdorf’s talk, Epistemics for Artists at Oregon Contemporary and saw Dean Spade at PSU. I noticed the way my favorite performance artists were, alongside the academics I was reading and watching, quite literally weaving the practice of others, citationally, into those of their own. I saw the way artists were leveraging the practice of citation to activate their activism.
As I’m engaging with the above, doors are opening and I find myself thinking a lot about the concept of “backlinks”—the importance of which (as it pertains to search engine rankings) I really only understand because of the digital strategy work I’ve done for web clients (design, UX, SEO, and accessibility, not coding).
In 2007, Frank Lester published an article called “Backlinks: Alternatives to the Citation Index for Determining Impact” in The Journal of Electronic Publishing. In this article, he writes:
Hyperlinks are uniquely bidirectional. Links that point forward to other pages are common knowledge, but it is only in the last several years that backlinks, or links that point to a resource rather than from it, have become a subject of study and interest. (Backlinks are defined here as links from other pages to webpage or URL x rather than the links that are contained in, or pointing away from, webpage or URL x.) As Soumen Chakrabarti and his colleagues point out, citations, since they emphasize the idea that all current knowledge builds on prior knowledge, are a “fundamental part” of academic writing. “By following citations,” the paper notes, “the reader is able to trace backward in time through the evolution of ideas that leads to the current work.” Until relatively recently, tracing citations was a unidirectional process — readers could find out where an idea came from, but not much more. Backlinks transform the process into a two-way street, showing not only where an idea comes from, but also where it is going – what level of attention or interest that a resource, an article, or a paper is receiving or generating; what influence it is having on those who encounter it; what intellectual fruit the seed of the idea is germinating; what intellectual ferment the idea is fostering. [text emphasis, mine]
Backlinks transform the process into a two-way street, showing not only where an idea comes from, but also where it is going … I’m thinking world-building, magical thinking, and mapping the future.
What I once imagined as <—> became a sort of map:
Was it citation when Autumn Knight invited Justine Chambers to perform in a bed (that performance is why I even know who Justine Chambers is)? Is it citation when an author talks about their style as a mashup of their heroes x, y, and z? How about the art of sampling?
Enter, Brutal Joy. A performance? Lecture? Talk? which felt like the real real answer to the question of citation that I’d begun answering for myself with the works I mentioned above.
And how could it not, ending as it did with an audience-inclusive group performance of The Electric Slide.
[ Photos, Ryan-Ashley ]
Longwinded* citation
* I don’t remember if this phrase was used by the artist or if it’s what I jotted to describe the way Chambers approached citation, but, let the record reflect that, if a note of my own, I’ve never said “longwinded” so lovingly, because the citations were such a treat
un/bearable
relational knowing
referential … ellipses …
If only … should …
Christina Sharpe
in excess of those studies
[nothing ordinary about
Ordinary Notes]
“the everyday”
footnotes →
current understanding
6th life
call-and-response
grandmother [aunt? hearing loss is a bitch–my scarred drums like sieves]
chipped nail polish–the signs you notice
[when my great-grandmother was moved in old age to a small unit on the block, my grandmother would send me over to brush her hair and paint her nails and talk to her a while.
sometimes we’d play cards and she’d become frustrated that I didn’t know any rules.
I’d hold her hand in my hand, skin soft and dusty like dough covered in flour,
and paint her nails, watching the color separate over the unyielding ridges, pooling.
an immigrant, always trying to sound and look as ‘American’ … as ‘respectable’ as possible.
thick accent ‘til the day she died and that always shocked her
refusing the public eye without a brush and a polish and a perfectly tailored dress. Which, of course, she had made herself]
sameness / the everyday
basements as gathering places: senior centers, church events, reunions
holding loosely
theory as form of storytelling
dark bar, anonymity in group closeness
all work starts with, “You feel me?”
*************************
PERSONAL ORIENTATION
feeling
seeing / understanding
*************************
final … what is final?
gesture — heirloom su(i)te
dandyism
unbearable:
*
* *
* *
* *
* *
* tarry *
* *
* *
* *
* *
* *
*
collective location = circle dance
codes + modes of sociality
ability to choose one’s own outfit everyday = freedom
dandy
interrogation of colonist’s perception ….
a bridge between slavery + emancipation
“imagine ourselves
otherwise”
other / wise
other / wise
other / wise
[thinking about the intersectionality of gender dys/euphoria]
body sovereignty →
Katherine McKittrick
our bodies are recording devices
stop giving yourself away!!!
[the one good piece of advice my mother ever gave me: you don’t have to say yes, just because someone wants you — this can apply to lovers, bosses, friends]
in(co)herent
——|
embodiment theory } | central to cognition |
___|
[what’s the difference between a list + listicle? i remember when this word began coming up in ad agency copywriting meetings and it made my stomach turn. like the word ‘bluesky’ — let’s have a bluesky session! — but even so, I do love the from]
unison / not unison
vaseline
cycles of abuse
hanging from uncle’s biceps
[where were the safe men in my life?]
layaway, beaded purses
inheritance / heirloom / archive
brutal joy
embodied archive already there
work is a living library
heartbreaking
line dance—dance
“right is a very presumptuous thing to say”
like like I said
[like, remember?. the same of a loving correction … me talking to my grandmother, frustrated that she couldn’t remember something I’d told her. I repeated the story and said, remember? and it passed right along but then, later in the conversation, she said, “A very loving thing is to, when somebody doesn’t remember something, to just tell them again. because anything else will just make them feel bad and it won’t make them remember”
gotten better at that with her, and working on it with my husband]
walking structure to the electric slide
{someone popping gum at the other side of the stage}
Three piece
trousers
vest
jacket
the suit is a set
dandy is WEARING the suit
Sadiya Hartman
|
→ “the love of too much”
waxed cotton→ storytelling
repeated actions, the working of taut and slack
[remember selvedge?]
molding, bearing witness
rehearsal
Noline Rooks [sp?]
feeling is knowing is feeling
“what wer are not allowed is the way we have to be”
jaggedness of curiosity
resist legibility
[decoy]
method-making is relation
^
|
method
evade description
stay with the trouble
vamp–feeling what’s there
musical vamps
the break–fugitive choreography/unruly excess
innovation of otherness
the arrival of the break cannot be ….
grenatred?
g_enatred?
grenat_ed?
*
*
the *
gum *
popper *
needs *
to *
go!!!!!! *
*
*
*
[she’s across from us
sitting on the floor
chomping
and I can hardly hear another thing]
otherwise iterations
___
Ashon Crawley – queer pentecostal theory
___
self-posession
invocation of the otherwise
Octavia Butler
Rock Steady
Aretha Franklin
Now who wants to dance!?
[ PERFORMANCE DESCRIPTION ]
(via PICA’s website)
This performative lecture speaks to and with the conceptual and historical underpinnings of Justine A. Chambers’ latest choreographic project, The Brutal Joy. In the talk, Chambers discusses dance and fashion as counter archives, the processes of ritualization and individuation, and the oscillation between the compositional structures of the riff, the vamp, and the break, letting provisional moments of self-actualization in the present surface through a dance of future possibilities. Emerging from traces of childhood memories of family gatherings on the South Side of Chicago, The Brutal Joy unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black living.
[ ABOUT THE ARTIST ]
Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, Canada. Her practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. At the centre of her practice is a question often posed by her grandmother: “You feel me?” This question is both a declaration of one’s personal orientation, and an invitation to reorient and include what is held in our flesh. Chambers meets this question in her work by attending to individual and collective embodied archives, social choreographies of the everyday, and choreography/dance as otherwise ways of being in relation. Chambers’ work has been hosted at galleries, festivals, and theaters nationally and internationally including Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), Troy, NY; Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto, ON; Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, Montreal, QC; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Sophiensaele, Berlin, Germany; National Arts Centre, Ottawa, ON; Agora de la Danse, Montreal, QC; Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford, PA; Artspeak, Vancouver, BC; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC; Western Front, Vancouver, BC; The Dance Centre, Vancouver, BC; Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver, BC; and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. Chambers holds a MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and is currently Assistant Professor in Dance at the School for Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, and Associate Artist to The Dance Centre, Vancouver, BC. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.
TBA:25 Dailies / Day #2
by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney//| TBA:25Time-Based Art Festival by Portland Institute of Contemporary Art
Friday, September 4th
[reflections provided by Ryan-Ashley Anderson Maloney]
Performance ⅓
Horizon, performed by Tahni Holt and Emma Lutz-Higgins
[ Photo, Adrian Hutapea ]
Two bodies draped over
two solitary boulders,
pushed together
smooth and creamy
bone-colored
Spotlights like sunrises
static builds and chatter recedes
How do we all know when to go quiet?
Still for quite some time,
the bodies animate, slowly
like smooth little gasps
along with the sounds of crashing waves
slowly they separate
[unchoreographed?] and
move through the space
[no, definitely choreographed]
arms swinging
feet clapping against the ground like children’s feet slapping while running along the side of a pool
repetition
music fills the space but not so much—you can hear the performers gasping and feet clapping and hands slapping thighs and brushing the fabric of their costumes
smiling
skipping
fun
frivolity
[girlhood?]
repetition
[thinking of Cosmic Dancer by T. Rex]
return –
quiet, draping, pulsing
space blanket
hollow space held and crawled into
boombox / hot beats
the kind of friendship I imagine
collapse
pulling closer
clasped hands
pulling / pressing
foreheads together
bodies pressed
clinging
an extended, joyful, restorative embrace
[I think about that thing I heard about restoration beginning after twenty seconds of embrace]
I imagine my sister
this birth
lights pump
planetary bass
carrying with and crawling inside
[a snail]
music like rainsticks
[running of against a wall: is this what you want from me?]
self-immolation
shell animations
inside of and beneath, perched,
supine beneath a blanket
“love is a stranger”
drive you far away
blanket pulled under a rock
[ skip to performance ⅔ ]
[ PRODUCTION + PARTICIPANTS ]
> Choreographed in collaboration with Emma Lutz-Higgins
> Composer / Luke Wyland
> Visual artist / Jess Perlitz
> Lighting Designers / Al Knight Blaine and James Mapes
> Costume Designer + Visual Artist / Kim Smith Claudel
> Dramaturg / Kate Bredeson
[ ABOUT THE ARTISTS ]
(via PICA’s website)
Tahni Holt is a dance artist and somatic practitioner whose work is rooted in collaboration and community. Born and raised in what is now known as Portland, OR, she has spent most of her life in the shadow and glow of Mt. Hood. Her work has been presented nationally at On the Boards, Seattle, WA; Velocity Dance, Seattle, WA; Fusebox Festival, Austin, TX; DiverseWorks, Houston, TX; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; and White Bird, Portland, OR. She is a recipient of an NDP Touring Award and Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship, to name a few. Internationally, her work has been performed in Bulgaria and Portugal and supported through residencies in France, Greece, and Romania. Holt is the founder and one of four current stewards of FLOCK Dance Center.
Emma Lutz-Higgins is a Portland-based dance maker and performer whose choreographic work uses movement, text, and nonlinear narrative to explore perception, identity, and possibility. She has performed at AUNTS, Brooklyn, NY; Movement Research, New York, NY; Gibney Dance, New York, NY; New York Live Arts, New York, NY; Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn, NY; and Danspace Project, New York, NY. In March 2025, she premiered her first evening-length work, FLOOR, through PWNW’s Alembic Residency. Her performances have been reviewed in Oregon Arts Watch and The New York Times. Lutz-Higgins holds a BA from Bard College.
Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and cultural organizer who has lived and worked in Portland, Oregon, for over twenty years. As a person who stutters, his practice is rooted in disability justice and the rich terrain of speech diversity. In collaboration with the nonprofit SPACE, he curates the Library of Dysfluent Voices, a first-of-its-kind living archive that reimagines stuttering as a generative, expressive mode of communication. Through sound, community exchange, and immersive installations, he explores the textures of voice and the politics of fluency, inviting new ways of listening and learning. Wyland has been releasing critically acclaimed records for the past 20 years in the groups AU and Methods Body, as LWW, and under his own name, working with such labels as New Amsterdam, Beacon Sound, Balmat, The Leaf Label, and Aagoo Records.
Jess Perlitz makes sculptures that explore how the body gets defined through landscape, public spaces, and social structures. The work seeks to disrupt established expectations and direct attention to both incongruous experience and the potential for connection. Born in Toronto, Canada, Perlitz received an MFA from Tyler School of Art, BA from Bard College, and clown training from the Manitoulin Center for Creation and Performance. She is currently based in Portland, Oregon where she is Associate Professor and Head of Sculpture at Lewis & Clark College. Perlitz is the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Oregon Arts Commission Joan Shipley Award, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. In 2019, she was named a Hallie Ford Fellow. Her project, Chorus, is currently installed at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, PA as part of the museum’s ongoing artists installation series.
James Mapes is a lighting designer, writer, and board game creator who’s lived in Portland all his life. Working primarily in dance, he’s toured all over the world with companies like BodyVox, Éowyn Emerald and Dancers, and Mammalian Diving Reflex. At home, he’s the Festival Director for Risk/Reward and works a whole bunch of places. He has a family, who is great, and a library, which is secret.
Al Knight-Blaine is a lighting designer and technician working in Portland and the surrounding Pacific Northwest. Alongside his day job lighting events and music festivals with Outlaw Lighting, he is the resident lighting designer for Open Space Dance and Night Flight Aerial, is the festival lighting designer for Risk Reward, and is the head of lighting at PICA. Knight-Blaine is a graduate of Southern Oregon University, with a BFA emphasizing in lighting design (and three math minors!).
Kate Bredeson is a dramaturg, director, translator, and theatre historian. Her project as a scholar and artist is to research, document, and practice the ways in which performance can be a tool for radical activism and protest. As a dramaturg, she has worked with Tahni Holt on Pulse Mountain (with Muffie Delgado Connelly, 2022), Rubble Bodies (2018), andSensation/Disorientation (2017), theatres including the Court (Chicago) and Yale Repertory Theatre (New Haven), and is the recipient of two fellowships from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. She is the author of three books, all published with Northwestern University Press: Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May ’68 (2018); The Inheritor, co-translated with Thalia Wolff (2024); and The Diaries of Judith Malina, (forthcoming from Northwestern, 2026). She is currently editing Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances by Anthony Hudson (forthcoming, 2026). Bredeson is Professor of Theatre at Reed College.
Kim Smith Claudel is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, OR, whose work intersects painting, sculpture, installation, and performance through a wide range of media. Smith Claudel’s work has been exhibited internationally, including shows in Japan and Sweden, as well as throughout the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include the Painting Center, New York, NY; Mt. Hood Community College, Portland, OR; and Carnation Contemporary, Portland, OR. She is an active member of the artit collective WAVE Contemporary and Carnation Contemporary. She is the recipient of the 2025 Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and Ford Family Foundation, and was recently awarded an artist in residency at Building 5. She holds an MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, as well as an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, NY.
*
Performance ⅔
Dads, by Drama Tops, a Queer Tragedy performed by Elby Brosch and Shane Donohue
[ Photo, Salt Photo ]
[ Photo, Ryan-Ashley ]
Performers emerge
covered in feathers
from the audience
[Queer Tragedy?]
tender confession
a body debilitated
there will only be one
dancer tonight
Shane enters the stage alone
Elby stations himself in the front row, watching
[even typing this now, I find my breath catching]
what is supposed to be
the two of them
performed as one
Shane pulls the costume on the left from the velcro wall,
dresses himself, and leaves
the other–
Elby’s.
Dancing
beats
sustained undulation
and inflation of many, many
translucent orange objects
all in a row at the edge of the stage, sticking them to himself as he goes
Elby comes to help and they inflate together
Two Tires
pushing and pulling,
connected by ropes
[would Elby otherwise be riding one of the two?]
Shane rides them into stage
center, one at a time
[thinking of our wedding song, Helplessly Hoping…
We are one person
They are three together
They are for each other
]
Elby joins,
lies down,
invites Shane to put a tire on his chest and mount it
I can take more weight
Less weight
More weight
Less weight
The push/pull of carrying, releasing, holding, sharing confession of loss, grief, nostalgia for childhood
the terrible effort of trying to remember somebody’s face.
[ skip to final performance ]
[ PRODUCTION ]
Sponsorship / made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’s National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, and by John Robinson, Jason LeBrun, and Jason Dixon.
[ ABOUT THE ARTISTS ]
(via PICA’s website)
Seattle’s [self-professed] hottest postmodern nightlife performance duo, Drama Tops was born of the artistic partnership of Elby Brosch and Shane Donohue. They began making work together seven years ago with the creation of a solo on two bodies. The dynamic between their trans body and cis body has created beautiful moments of frustration, competition, tenderness, and comedy. Drama Tops blends the worlds of nightlife and concert modern dance to create an interesting and unique blend of accessible and funny modern dance. You may have seen Drama Tops perform their smash hit Boys! Boys! Boys!, presented by Velocity Dance Center’s Made in Seattle program, or their self-produced show, Drama Tops, this is for you at Washington Hall in Seattle. Other performances include NW New Works Festival presented by On the Boards, Seattle, WA; Family Meal and Catharsis at Kremwerk, Seattle, WA; Heels! at Cha Cha, Seattle, WA; High F@ggotry, Seattle, WA, and more.
*
Final Performance
Blessed with Switch, performed by Jasmine Orpilla
[ Photo, Ian ]
| Office chair in the middle of the stage
| Sterile, white, dim, cool
| Jasmine enters, all black
| Determined
| She speaks, but does she?
| When language loses meaning
| [thinking of the concept of ‘glitch’]
| mutterings, exclamations, cries
| mixing language
| incoherence / illegibility
| an act of refusal
| [to be truly seen / heard / known]
| Switch! Turn it off!
| Switch! Turn it off!
| Switch! Turn it off!
[ Visit PICA for 9/6 + 9/7 lineup ]
[ PRODUCTION ]
> Sponsorship / This presentation is part of the Performance Art Museum’s Long Term Residency (LTR) program, which has named Asher Hartman as the inaugural recipient. LTR is made possible thanks to the Performance Art Foundation, with additional support from Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins, Abby Sher, and Mariel Carranza.
> Composer / Jasmine Orpilla
> Writer + Director / Asher Hartman
[ ABOUT THE ARTISTS ]
(via PICA’s website)
Asher Hartman is an interdisciplinary artist, director, writer, and creator of live performances. His works operate in the charged space between performance art, experimental theater, and immersive installation. In this sphere of intensely amplified perception, Hartman generates works that grapple with the myriad of social and political issues that dominate this current era of chronic crisis. Often situating personal and emotional history in relation with the ideologies that structure Western culture, his works are dense, visual, poetic, embodied texts, where clown and cringe humor are layered upon moments of desperate rage and arousal. In every work, Hartman implants evidence of his own trance and psychic journeying, set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and elicit indelible feelings.
Hartman received his BA in Theater from University of California, Los Angeles and his MFA in Studio Arts from CalArts, where he has since become a faculty member in the CalArts School of Theater. He has also taught at Otis College of Art and Design, and University of California, Riverside. He is the founder and chief of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of artist-actors for whom he has written and directed since 2010. Hartman was also one half of the performative duo Krystal Krunch (with Haruko Tanaka), and over the course of their collaboration the two artists taught intuition-building work to artists, activists, and interested members of the public. From 1999-2005, Hartman co-directed Crazy Space, a performance art venue that featured artists such as Dark Bob, Mariel Caranza, Mario Gardener, Jamie McMurry, Johana Went, Kristina Wong, Liz Young, and Paul Zaloom.
Hartman’s recent projects include The Mommy Leaks the Floor at New Hollywood Theater, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Blessed with Switch with Jasmine Orpilla at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2024) and University of California, Irvine, The Art of Performance (2024); It’s Better to Start Out Ugly at JOAN, Los Angeles, CA (2023) and The Lab, San Francisco, CA (2023). Past Gawdafful National Theater performances include The Dope Elf, Yale Union, Portland, OR (2019) revised as Organized Around the Erotics of Doing You In at The Lab, San Francisco, CA (2021); Sorry, Atlantis, Or Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, Machine Project, Los Angeles, CA (2017); The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance, LACMA, Los Angeles, CA (2016); and Annie Okay!, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2010). Hartman’s recent publications include Mad Clot on a Holy Bone (X Artists’ Books, 2020); Female Hallucinations, Folk Horses, and Gaunt Motherfuckers (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Jasmine Orpilla is a multipliced Ilokana/x-American vocal performance artist and operatic composer of experimental theatrical sound installations, in which she activates her lifelong practices of folk ritual dance, combat systems, and music of the Philippine diaspora, against the contemporary American framing of the first generation, imperialist military culture of her own childhood. Unlimited by “soprano” nor so-called classical beauty, her unfiltered voice-in-motion exorcizes eurocentric performance structures from her muscle memory, while remaining accountable to the oral legacies and languages of the Indigenous Pilipino musical systems she, her family, and community remains indebted to. With decades embodying center with her energetically intensive solo practice as a multi-instrumental and multilingual writer/performer, Orpilla’s work serves to humanize and honor the intersectionality of the Filipina/x-American body in agency, despite ongoing minimization of colonial history’s revisionist narratives.
Orpilla’s performance installations are intentionally embedded with materials from her own family archives, such as portraiture, heirloom jewelry, clay pottery, rare handwoven cloth, uniforms, medallions, defunct weaponry, soil, bone, gold, copper, hand-forged musical instruments and handwritten letters. As fragile materials that have survived wartime, she creates with them a kinetic, movement- and sound- sensitive space in which to re-visit, elevate, or question the inter-generationally impacted stories preserved in each object, while marking their decay over time in correlation to her voice and body.
Following intensive experience with world-renowned theater and opera directors such as Ariane Mnouchkine at Théâtre du Soleil, Paris, and Peter Sellars, over the past ten years Orpilla has taken space, internationally performing in genre-defying voices at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; CAP UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, CA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA; Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany; Théâtre Paris-Villette, Paris, France; HAU Hebbel Berlin, Germany; and more. Jasmine Orpilla’s solo and collaborative work has been supported by Creative Capital, United Artists, California Arts Council, Alliance for California Traditional Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Durfee Foundation, Mairie de Paris, and more.
TBA:25 Dailies / Day #1
by Ryan-Ashley (Anderson) Maloney//| TBA:25Time-Based Art Festival by Portland Institute of Contemporary Art
Thursday, September 4th
Omni Rail by Angelo Scott at PNCA
[reflections provided by Ryan-Ashley Anderson Maloney]
Thinking: The Way White Noise Opens
Standing in a semi-circle on the ground level
looking up to the next and the third stories
people hang over railings
wires connect
I say hi as a friend passes by, but they disregard
I feel like a ghost
what did I do?
old feelings, a heavy rock in the gut,
then another person passes and another
and I realize I’m right on the edge
bodies undulate, rippling us in the periphery,
lulling like a wave pulling on the shore
a fine [is it?] line
people above knock and bang and clang at the railing
the metal an amplifier, white noise droning alongside
I feel loud noises in my body, each bang a shock,
but the presence of the droning noise made all the sounds
a part of a whole—more of a blanket than a bed of nails
a dancer stands on their head
a foot next to my face
we ripple
everything slow at first, but
momentum builds.
I anticipate a climax,
but the climax doesn’t come
intention
\ /
\ /
rigidity \ / softness
/\
/ \
/ \
intuition
undulating, oceanic, school of fish
one body, three floors, moving together
perfectly
call-and-response between the floors
full-bellied vocals
like the way you might lose yourself in the drone
of a singing bowl,
something opens
I lose myself
I wish someone said I’d be so lonely
Oh wait, my mother did.
That time I came home from school crying
over being misunderstood again.
Ill-fitting as a stranger.
Am I speaking some other language? [yes]
Bad brain, she said.
It reverberated.
Poison brain, he explained,
was the reason for leaving.
A slow death. A very long goodbye.
Banging
scratching
bodies moving faster now
Building toward an end.
Pushing.
pulling.
Sea foam.
everything is everything,
everything is nothing.
shifting in my shoes.
that damn toe.
then just as I think it’s gone on too long,
it all culminates into one final burst.
then nothing, and release.
I feel my pulse pull free,
the collective thrum now just
one.