Performed at
Poetic Research Bureau
Los Angeles, California
16 April 2024
Curated by
Emji Saint Spero
Pre-medicated. Irreverent. Cutty and sprung. Communicator Series no. 4 activates with calculated precision, in spite and solidarity. Tuesday April 16th, 7pm, at Poetic Research Bureau. Performances by Sheree Rose, jeremy kennedy and Bay Area artist Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta negotiate incoherence and insurrectionary strategies for dismembering linearity...i.e. if it can exist it must exist. Devotedly yours.
Free / RSVP
About the Artists
The performance, photography and video work of Los Angeles based artists, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose shook, rattled and rolled across the United States in the late 1980’s beginning with Nailed a performance at Olio, a small space in Silverlake, Los Angeles, that was notorious for Flanagan nailing his scrotum to a board, Rose cutting into the breasts of a woman strapped to a cross, which caused grown men to faint, and drew the attention of Jesse Helms, a United States senator, which ended much funding of the National Endowment of the Arts, and rallied artists to declare “Art is not a Crime!”
Flanagan and Rose exhibited their extreme show, Visiting Hours at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. After Flanagan’s death in 1996, the documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist graced the screens of Sundance to great acclaim.
Rose was commissioned by Japan to produce Boballoon, a 20-foot inflatable statue, complete with leather straightjacket and 4-foot erect penis, which was exhibited at Big Space in Tokyo. Rose has continued to show her photography at international galleries, including the Tate Modern in Liverpool, Country Club and Coagula Galleries in Los Angeles. She has done a number of cutting edge performances, including Corpse Pose at various venues, and Breaking Borders at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, California.
Beginning in 2010 Rose has collaborated with English performance artist, Martin O’Brien, both in London and in Los Angeles, including Do with Me As You Will, Dust to Dust, and If It Were the Apocalypse (I’d eat you to stay alive). They performed The Viewing, a posthumous concept by Flanagan in November 2016 at the DaDaFest in Liverpool, and Overture for the End (An Ashen Place) in August 2023 at Whitechapel Gallery, London.
In 2017, Rose curated Every Breath You Take, at Jason Vass Gallery in Los Angeles. A book about her life and art, Rated RX: Sheree Rose Before and After Bob Flanagan, edited by Yetta Howard, was published in 2020 by Ohio University Press.
ig @msrosebush
Jeremy Kennedy (b. 01.01.1980) has been creating and exhibiting art and ideas in community and academic settings since the mid-1990s. Before moving to Los Angeles in 2009, the largely self-taught artist spent over a decade living and working in Bloomington, Indiana. Her pieces and projects have been featured in publications and journals internationally, and in galleries, streets, backyards, and basements across the U.S.
Her practice as an active sound-maker (i.e.: composer, performer, producer of designed(?) sound), both informs and is informed in equal relation to the other aspects of her art. Behind these scenes, she is the remaining member / now operator of the fairweather micro-label, The Fuck Me Stupid Mountain Princess Recording Collective (FMSMPRC).
As co-founder, playwright, and reluctant performer with p/sicho street theater company, she produces collaborative radio/audio theatre productions and site-specific works for stage & salon. She can be found in print as the author of A Gamble in this Dress, Free Flyer (Volume One), NOTE TO SEA, was a contributing essayist/editor of Cry List, and is a founding editor of the artbook/poetry imprint Rebel Hands Press. Her new book, Mandatory Administrative Leave is forthcoming Spring 2024 from Make Now Books.
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an anarchist artist and poet interested in ways of living and telling. They are the author of two books of poetry, and are at work on another, as well as a speculative acid western lesbian romantic ethnomusicological history of Chicana country music & revolution on 1970s Valencia Street. They have written non-fiction essays on things such as Latinx youth activism in Idaho, Central American migrant families in Tijuana & those that support them, and Angeleno psychogeography. A Latinx Jewish person of mixed indigenous & settler descent from the unceded lands of the Tongva people, they are a long term guest in Yelamu, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands, where they garden with their partner & bake challah every Friday.
tinyurl.com/tatiana-l-a
The Easy Body | La Movida
ig @kashigoodfriends