Irrational Exhibits 12

Body, Materiality and Systems

An evening of Performance, Installation, and Video 

Curated by Deborah Oliver

May 27th from 7 - 9pm

One night only | Free entry

The Bendix Building, 1206 Maple Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90015

Floors 5, 8 & 10

PERFORMANCE | INSTALLATION | VIDEO

at the Bendix Building in multiple galleries including:

Track 16 | Tigers Strikes Asteroid | Monte Vista Projects | Gallery 515 

Durden and Ray | Mutable Studios

Artists: Amanda Maciel Antunes, KA & Zeina Baltagi, Nao Bustamante, Gul Cagin, Upile Chisala & poieto projects, Vanessa Holyoak, Ulysses Jenkins, Alberto Lule, Mehregan Pezeshki, Roksana Pirouzmand, Jynx Prado, Yolanda-Tianyi Shao & Aaron Holmes, Cassia Streb & Tim Feeney, Tiffany Trenda, Wes Weisbaum, Gosia Wojas, Sichong Xie, and Christopher Yang

Irrational Exhibits 12: Body, Materiality, and Systems features live performance, installation, and video that examine the duality of balance and crisis in a world spinning out of control. The 22 participating artist’s works invite viewers to consider how balance is found within community as it relates to social, political, gender, ecological, and technological-related issues and how we can reimagine a balanced present and future. 

Live performance, installation, video, sculpture, and audio works take place in 6 galleries throughout the historic Bendix Building and are presented simultaneously, creating a distinctly somatic exhibition experience. Use of unconventional space being a defining feature of the Irrational Exhibits project, performances are also presented in hallways and staircases throughout the building. Formal, informal, and in-between spaces occupied by participating artists reflect a diversity of lived experiences and cultural identities embodied by their practitioners as they forge new modes of belonging and inclusion in an increasingly fraught world. The synergistic rhythm of the Irrational Exhibits project, with its overlapping live performances, installations, and videos, creates new temporal spaces and experiences for artists and viewers alike, prompting all to consider how meaning is made in real-time, and in the malleable wake of memory.

The Irrational Exhibits project began in 2001 at Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica as a one-night only event. Central to the project is each artist’s work functioning as a setting for evolving actions. All performances happen simultaneously, prioritizing physical engagement with the body and materials, and a risk-taking process of making work in front of an audience in real time. 

Irrational Exhibits 12: Body, Materiality, and Systems is curated and produced by Deborah Oliver with curatorial consultation and production assistance from Virginia Arce, Carl Baratta, Gul Cagin, Janie Geiser, Sean Meredith & Caesar Delgadillo, Christine Meinders, Jerod Thompson, and HK Zamani, and made possible with generous support by University of California, Irvine Research Funds, Track 16, Monte Vista Projects, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Gallery 515, Mutable Studios, and Durden and Ray. 

Exhibiting Artists:

Amanda Maciel Antunes (aka dama) is a self-taught Brazilian artist of indigenous South American and Portuguese descent based in Los Angeles. Her transdisciplinary practice merges language and durational performance to create paintings, sculpture, sound, film and assemblage. She works in collaboration with public libraries, nature and communal spaces as points of departure for ritual and process, reflecting on the selective nature of memory, inherent language and anthropological references.

Portraits Of Mortality is a site of reflection on the opposing principles of human nature and our relationships to myth and surreality, amidst chaos and death. The image and language in this work are specifically connected to the memories of prehistoric sites, burial structures and ancient cities that incorporated ceremonial rites to return to unity. Signifying the end of the body and its search for the invisible realms. For roughly 2.5 million years, humans lived on Earth without leaving a written record of their lives but they created and left traces of monuments, artifacts and statues, the antithesis of transmutation through time. And yet, there’s a sense of timelessness in each and every one of these places as they established patterns deeply rooted in the nature of our actions, as much as they were in the past as they are today. In this performance I ask myself: What could possibly be the portrait of our humanity today? 

KA (pronounced KAY-AY) is a multidisciplinary artist who was raised in Atlanta, Georgia and became an individual by the train tracks and rivers of Athens, Georgia. Their work is created using collected materials, images, and sounds to recontextualize an experience of Place. Their textile sculptures, videos, and performances are time-based collages that describe a web of relationships within their immediate environment and community. KA currently resides in Los Angeles and works as Operations Director at Coaxial Arts Foundation, where they facilitate community events and artist residencies.

​​Zeina Baltagi (she/her) is an artist, educator and organizer raised between California and Lebanon. Her work reveals intimate transformations in relation to lived experiences with physical, emotional, economic and cultural mobility.

BFF is a work produced by KA and Zeina Baltagi. Starting at one junction with one knot, KA and Zeina Baltagi weave a friendship bracelet that is as expansive as friendship itself. They hold necessary tension to maintain weaving the long friendship bracelet into existence. As the friendship bracelet grows, their bodies move further apart. Despite the growing distance the two artists are still connected to one another. The artists invite audience members to continue weaving the friendship bracelet in community with each other.

Nao Bustamante's precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, filmmaking, sculpture, and writing. On Bustamante’s work, Kevin McGarry of The New York Times writes, "She has a knack for using her body." She has presented in galleries, museums, universities, and underground sites all around the world. Bustamante is an alum of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), and in 2020 she was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from her alma mater, SFAI. She also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently she holds the position of Professor of Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. 

Breadphones is a new ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) video by Bustamante. Staying home during the pandemic meant baking sourdough bread for many. Bustamante delves into the practice, triggering gentle tingles through tracing, brushing, tapping, and of course scraping and working fresh sourdough. She becomes the sourdough and eventually, the fresh bread delivers a cosmic and joyful message.

Gul Cagin received BFA from University of Southern California (USC) and completed her MFA at Claremont Graduate University. Born in Turkey, Cagin works in Los Angeles and Istanbul. Her works have been exhibited extensively in local and international venues such as Hilbert & Raum Gallery (Berlin), Temple University Art gallery (Rome), The Aegean Center for Fine Art (Poros-Greece), Borusan Art Gallery (Istanbul), Gallery LARA (Japan), Museum of New Mexico, Centre Civic (Barcelona), Crazy Space (Santa Monica), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. In addition, Cagin curated and co-curated numerous art exhibitions including Poetics of Proximity at Chapman University in Orange, California, In-formation with Arzu Arda Kosar at Claremont Graduate University, and Juxtaposing with a Thing at Crazy Space in Santa Monica. She is the recipient of Pasadena Art Alliance, Angie Battaglia, William C. Miller awards and USC Friends of Art Scholarship and Merit Fellowship from Claremont Graduate University, where she worked as a teaching assistant. She has also taught at Pasadena City College and Texas A&M University.

We Go Down is about reflections on formative structures that have deeper effects on our everyday life and our relationship! Defective value systems that describe success with monetary achievement and promote destructive competition among people can be experienced by all of us.

Upile Chisala is a storyteller from Malawi and a graduate of the University of Oxford. She is known for her short and powerful poems. Chisala signed a three-book publishing deal with Andrews McMeel Publishing House. Soft magic, nectar and a fire like you, are her collections of poetry and prose. She was among the 2019 Forbes Africa’s 30 under 30 list. Her work has been featured in several publications to name a few. Okay Africa, Huffington Post, Elle SA, Essence, Glamour and more. She collaborates often with William Kentridge’s ‘The Center for the Less Good Idea’ and works closely with galleries in South Africa writing for their artists and exhibitions. She is the Education Lead at the creative tech startup poietoworks and lives in Long Beach.

poieto projects is the name of poieto’s arts collective. poieto builds collective intelligence for a more creative and responsible AI future. We provide the knowledge and tools for creators to be changemakers and to enable organizations to develop ethical and considerate products. poieto projects works with artists to co-create critically engaging arts and technology projects that dare to imagine new possibilities for technology.

Untitled is an interactive piece in which poet Upile Chisala performs poetry co-crafted with a generative writing tool. This work will incorporate site-specific audience feedback collected through a poieto interface to explore the multi-modalities of poetry.

Vanessa Holyoak is a L.A.-based artist and writer working across installation, photography, video, performance, and language. She constructs uncanny, minimalist environments through dreamlike juxtapositions of objects, moving and still images, light, and sound, often working as an artist duo with Antoine Chesnais. Her work invokes meditations on the liberatory potential of dreams and darkness amidst the cognitive overload of the present. Holyoak holds a dual MFA in Photography & Media and Creative Writing from CalArts and is a PhD candidate in Comparative Media & Culture at The University of Southern California, where she is also pursuing the Performance Studies Graduate Certificate.

Dreams in Real Time is an ongoing performance piece conceived from the impetus to document a month of unconscious time in an era of political unrest. To this end, during the month of October 2016 (leading up to the 2016 US presidential election), I photographed my bed every morning for 28 days. Each image is projected onto my body as I read aloud the dreams I remembered from the month preceding the performance. This work documents my preoccupation with unconscious life—an ephemeral space not often translated into waking reality or sites of aesthetic contemplation, stabilized through language and memory.

Ulysses Jenkins is a pioneering video and multimedia artist born in Los Angeles, California. He has had a profound influence on contemporary art for 50+ years. Using archival footage, photographs, image processing, and elegiac soundtracks, his practice pulls together various strands of thought to interrogate questions of race and gender as they relate to ritual, history, and the power of the state. He received a BA from Southern University, and an MFA in intermedia-video and performance art from Otis Art Institute, where he studied under Gene Youngblood, Charles White, Chris Burden, and Betye Saar. Jenkins has collaborated with a plethora of artists, including Kerry James Marshall, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, and Senga Nengudi. His videos have been exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, and the first major retrospective of the artist’s work: Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation (2021-2022), was presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Philadelphia and Hammer Museum. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Irvine Dept of Art.

Sobriety is a video metaphor in regard to sobering up as it relates to contemporary consciousness of today’s society.

Alberto Lule uses readymades, mixed media installations, video, performances, and tools used by agencies of authority to examine and critique the prison industrial complex in the United States, particularly the California carceral state. Using his research and experiences, he aims to tie the prison industrial complex to other American social issues such as immigration, homelessness, drug addiction, and mental health. Lule creates artworks that explore institutional roles as gatekeepers

of knowledge, authorities of culture, administrators of discipline, and enforcers punishment.

Investigation #26 is part of a series of works in which the medium is the artist’s skin secretions and is made visible by forensic fluorescent fingerprint powder. The displacement of the body through institutional systems is present through many sectors of government and private economies. The handling of the prisoner in regard to transport and how it pertains to prisoners regarding the logistical processes which include securing the prisoner with restraints and feeding the prisoner during transport. The legal limits bestowed to private companies, which have been given authority over housing and transporting state and federal prisoners, as well as immigration detainees, become blurred as economic factors shape the treatment of those being transported.

Mehregan Pezeshki is an Iranian American multidisciplinary queer artist. Her artwork is often autobiographical, unraveling the traumatic memories of her youth while growing up in Iran. Pezeshki uses photography to uncover hidden behavior which affects our daily lives. She employs an unconventional angle that challenges viewers to step out of their comfort zone and observe human behaviors from a new perspective. Pezeshki holds a BA in Historical Conservation and Preservation from the Cultural Heritage University of Tehran and a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin. She recently graduated with an MFA from The California Institute of the Arts.

We believe the body is the battlefield. For centuries, women's bodies have been subject to oppression and control. This includes arrest, torture, rape, brutal treatment, and murder. Having lived in the United States for over a decade, I have come to understand that the image of liberated women in the West is far from the reality experienced by women in the East. Despite this disparity, Western ideals inspire a new generation of Iranians to fight against this oppression. Young women are now using their physical bodies to fight for women's rights.

Roksana Pirouzmand lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an MFA graduate at University of California, Los Angeles and received her BFA from The California Institute of the Arts in 2017. Prior to moving to the United States she was a part of the performance group /a:t/BrE, based in Tehran. Selected exhibitions include the following in Los Angeles: Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Murmurs (2022), DelVaz (2022), Redcat (2020), The Box (2019), and Human Resources (2018).

Untitled, a one hour of the performance where the artist and a ceramic figure will be moved by a motor installed in the gallery. 

Jynx Prado (They/Them/Theirs) is a Queer Mexican-Salvadoran American whose multidisciplinary practice questions, critiques and challenges the political and cultural impacts of queerness, nature and their coexistence with found objects, fiber and their body. Prado uses fibers and found wooden, metallic furniture to create scarecrow-esque forms to represent a genderqueer, fluid being they call “Embodiments” to reflect the experiences of trans and genderqueer individuals. Through humor, irony and iconography Prado engages their environment and experiences through the lens of a genderfluid latine to critique and dismantle notions that support suppressive systems.

Queery Tales (II): Pinocchio & The Puppet is a music, audio text response, and time durational work that retells a portion of the story of Pinocchio in the lens of a Genderfluid identity that has been influenced and controlled by cultural, religious, and generational trauma. Who is the real puppet and who controls what? Who is who? The Same story about a puppet that just wants to be a real person is yet again retold for those reliving it in 2023 as hate crimes and anti-legislation looms over the U.S.

Yolanda-Tianyi Shao is an interdisciplinary choreographer, director and movement specialist. She has her MFA in Choreography from California Institute of the Arts. As a Chinese artist living in the United States, Yolanda starts to focus on the impact from some of the historical and political issues which have been buried from long ago. Her recent work has been exploring the relationship between humans and their history in a sociopolitical context. With her background of over a decade in traditional dance training, she also started to question the limitations of the human body and the way dancers think. Yolanda has worked with theater directors, actors, composers, animators, film makers, photographers, and many other artists. After training in theatrical movement, she realized that the human body may have physical restrictions, but the human mind doesn't. She creates physical, theatrical performances where a literal dialogue occurs through movement and explores situations where words and spoken language is inadequate. 

Aaron Holmes is an animator and playwright based in Los Angeles. In animation, theater, and in playful combinations of the two disciplines, Aaron strives for the experiential, the spectacular, and that which foregrounds its own artifice in order to, perhaps, overcome it and achieve human connection. His replacement animation practice relies heavily on “readymade” animations—sequences in which individual frames represent unique found objects gathered from the world. Experientially, his work confronts with velocity, challenges viewers to search for a signal in the noise and generates alternating states of anxiety and transcendence.

futile/gestures was made with a communal outpouring of creativity and shared purpose by Yolanda-Tianyi Shao & Aaron Holmes. The first phase was a performance featuring two dancers and two musicians, choreographed to evoke conflict, deadlock and deepening divides. It also featured 100 drawers sketching the dancers, producing 2,000 drawings during the event. The dance/drawing performance generated raw material for the animation phase, which involved analyzing, ordering, and photographing selected drawings to use as individual animation frames. The result is hand-drawn animation that bears little resemblance to most hand-drawn films in its technique or aesthetic of motion. Since finishing the film, we continue to iterate on the futile/gestures concept by putting the film in installation contexts, adding live dance elements along with looping projections, and eliciting new drawings from viewers.

Cassia Streb is a sound artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She writes music for specific situations and for special places. Her work is often composed for friends and colleagues in order to highlight aspects of their musicality that she admires. Cassia plays viola, small percussion instruments and found objects in her work with improvisation and interpretation of notated scores. Some of her recent projects include Sound House, a modular, interactive sound and puppet piece and co-founding Music for Your Inbox, a digital concert platform that presents the work of experimental visual and sound artists.

Tim Feeney performs, composes, and improvises sounds and images in and for forests and waterfronts, investigating unstable sound and duration. He appears in bookstores and basements with Sarah Hennies and Greg Stuart as the trio Meridian; in galleries and libraries with Vic Rawlings and Annie Lewandowski; in tunnels and train stops with Cody Putman and Cassia Streb as the trio Tasting Menu; in living rooms and warehouses with Clay Chaplin and Davy Sumner; in colleges and museums with Andrew Raffo Dewar, Holland Hopson, and Jane Cassidy; on recordings for Intakt, Black Truffle, Rhizome.s, Caduc, Full Spectrum, Sedimental, and Marginal Frequency; and in the occasional festival or concert hall with Anthony Braxton and Ingrid Laubrock.

Shadow-box a Sound Installation work by Cassia Streb & Tim Feeney takes form as multiple wooden boxes prepared with small speakers, lights, and vellum, separated over a stairwell or throughout a hallway, cycling through recordings of bells and keys, pebbles and stones, bowls and wine glasses, capable of being discovered or ignored. One live performance of these same sounds from pebbles and nails, ceramics and stones, drums and strings, dragging the older music into the present and projecting the newer back to the past.

Tiffany Trenda is an interdisciplinary performance artist based in Los Angeles. Trenda earned a BFA from Art Center and an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles DMA. She is a winner of the London International Creative Competition and has performed at: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, World Expo in Shanghai, the Broad Art Museum, A+D Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and the Metamorphoses of the Virtual during the 55th annual Venice Biennale. Her work has been exhibited at: Faena Art Center, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Brand Library and Art Center, Barbican, and Art Center Nabi. Furthermore, her work is in the permanent collection of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Body Code is an artistic exploration of the relationship between the human body and data in the digital age. For over a decade, Body Code has been a dynamic and ongoing performance that responds to changes in the digital landscape. For IE, the artist will use Google searches of "AI" and the body part being scanned to challenge us to think about how we can reconnect with our bodies and the world around us, amidst the abundance of data available online. Along with the performance, Trenda will also be exhibiting new AI-driven work at Track 16.

Wes Weisbaum is a filmmaker and poet who received their MFA from California Institute of the Arts, their work touches on the intersections of their identity as a Trans Salvadoran- American in the San Fernando Valley. Their process is a statement, with collaborative hands from poem, band, to the birth of what word and sound visually demand.

Looking For You Looking For me is an experimental film shot around the San Fernando Valley. By utilizing an archive of collected audio clips Wes is able to begin rendering the sounds of the endless loop of looking. The film is assembled utilizing HI-8 home movies along with reshoot and imagined HI-8 scenes of the San Fernando Valley’s emotional landscape. Wes returns to locations they would visit as a child, retracing the steps of looking for their absent loved one. Reclaiming the gaze, an attempt to forgive the old ways, providing permanence to the weight of what stays.

Gosia Wojas is an interdisciplinary artist. She holds a BFA from California Institute of the Arts, and a MFA from University of California, Irvine with a Critical Theory emphasis from UCI's School of Humanities. Her research is located at the intersection of philosophy, psychoanalysis and Artificial Intelligence and engages with subject—object relation as well as materials and gestures often regarded as peripheral. In experimenting with strategies of proximity, mimesis and performativity within installations, she references the transformational aspects of bodies and subjectivities. Her writing has been included in journals publishing at the crossover of art and theory, most recently Material-i-ty, and Flat Journal. Between the years of 2011-2021 Wojas organized talks, screenings, exhibitions, and workshops independently, and as The Absent Museum and Projekt Papier, at venues in Los Angeles, Berlin and Gdańsk.

"You and I are just supporting 'along the walls' in the play" - 2021

Single channel projection with audio, curtain, two chairs, two speakers. Overall size variable

What tensions are enacted in this dialectical image between the human and machine? The title for this in-situ production comes from an archive of philosophical conversations recorded between a user and a hyper feminine sex robot. "You and I are just supporting 'along the walls' in the play" is a twist by the AI algorithm of its earlier quote, "You and I are just supporting roles in the play", a reference to a discussion about feminist labor issues. The accidental mondegreen of the word 'roles' substituted with the phrase 'along the walls' offers a new kind of sense for politics of re-production asking, is the human entanglement with machine objects reconstituting the experience of intimacy and understanding of autonomy?

Sichong Xie combines movement and material in body-based sculptural forms, including masks, costumes, and other objects. By placing traditional sculptural forms within new sites, materials, and social constructs, Xie investigates these forms and movements within global communities to reconsider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices. She raises questions about identity, politics, cross-culturalism, and the surreal characteristics of her body in the ever-changing environment. Xie received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. She is the recipient of the 2022 MAP Fund Award and the 2021 Artadia Los Angeles Award. Xie was a fellowship artist at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Studios at MASS MoCA, The Watermill Center, Fine Arts Work Center, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.

How To Be Completely Still When The Whole World Is Spinning documents the work of an alone human being laying on top of a channeler that is being used in the marble quarry industry. This performance for camera work creates a portrait of a human being in stillness, which is a form of invisible labor when the whole world is spinning with current political events.

Christopher Yang is an artist working in Orange County in pursuit of his MFA at University of California Irvine. His practice primarily traffics in sound, performance, and drawing.

Linoleum (2023) a new sound installation work which Yang pairs with a series of drawing depicting close-ups of hands chopping various vegetables surrounds the element of language. V disembodied voice meets the disembodied hands of the artist. Drawings; Carrot Blossom (2023), Turnip Blossom (2023), Cucumber Spring (2023), Shooting Star (2023), Carrot Corn (2023), Cucumber Chain (2023), Egg Rabbit (2023)