Multi-sensory, improvisational, chimeric, Communicator Series no.15 shrieks of speculative mythology. Performances by Ashton Phillips, local interdisciplinary shapeshifter, and New York-based artist Yvonne LeBien incite divestment, dressing down of the audience (herein: you) through a strategic deployment of discomfort. A reminder: refracting violence is as essential and relevant as ever. Less an austere unvitation than a summons to resist.
Tuesday January 13th
Poetic Research Bureau
7pm Doors
7:30pm Performances
Free / RSVP
tinyurl.com/commuseries15
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Communicator Series is a platform for queer and trans* artists whose practice is situated in-between, troubling the boundaries between poetry, archive, performance, activism, and collective intimacies. We're here for work that is switchy, vers, and language-curious, that teases the edges of form as a poetic strategy of becoming otherwise. Attempts, failure, and works-in-progress encouraged.
Curated by Emji Saint Spero | ig @homopathetic
Presented in collaboration with Poetic Research Bureau at 2220 Arts + Archives
Sound by jeremy kennedy | ig @table_blue
Video by Gentry McShane | ig @gentryxgx
Photo by Vaughan Larsen | ig @the.vaughan.show
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ARTISTS
Yvonne LeBien is a trans poet and performer based in Queens, NY. She is the editor of GenderFail, a small press publishing queer and trans artists. Yvonne has published numerous books with GenderFail including Christ’s Cunt and Vulnerability: Or, Why I Show My Tits And Cock And Balls In My Performances, as well as cumflower with Wendy’s Subway. She has released an album of extended vocal technique improvisations, Do You Really Like It When The Bad Thoughts Don’t Come, with trans-run label Voluminous Arts.
yvonnelebien.bandcamp.com
genderfailpress.info
ig @yvonnelebien
Ashton Phillips is a multi-sensory artist and writer focused on the plasticity of bodies, the transness of matter, and the poetics of impurity and mutual contamination. His practice prioritizes collaboration, experimental play, speculative (un)making, and embodied research over linear inquiry, hierarchical methods, or stable results. His work experiments with opacity/transparency/reflectivity, environmental color/sound/touch, indeterminacy, (il)legibility, and speculative world-building as strategies for disrupting cisnormative ways of looking, listening, and knowing.
Ashton’s multisensory installations and performances have been exhibited across the United States and abroad, including recent installations at MaryTwo Gallery in Luzern, Switzerland; Human Resources, LA; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, LA; the Ely Center for Contemporary Arts; and the Audobon Center at Debs Park. His creative and critical writing have been published by Trans Studies Quarterly; Antennae - The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture; Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles; and Cambridge University Press.