THE FRONT

February 17 - March 3, 2024

Carnival Schedule: OPENING THIRD SATURDAY

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Carnival Schedule: OPENING THIRD SATURDAY 〰️

February 17 - March 3, 2024

Opening reception on Third Saturday, February 17, 6-10pm,
with performances by Christine Crook at 7pm, the Serpentine Choir at 7:30pm, and live music by Dusty and the Decision at 8:30pm.

Gallery open hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5pm.

*the gallery will be closed on February 10th + 11th

Programming This Month:

Saturday, February 17th, 7pm

Opening Reception Live Performance
ft. Christine Crook, The Curse of Eve - A Mixtape

followed by

Live Music in the backyard from Dusty and the Decision at 8:30pm

 

Saturday, February 17th, 7:30pm

Special Performance by Serpentine Choir
–a queer femme choir dedicated to healing, pleasure and joyful forms of embodiment through the presence of song.

Serpentine choir will join the ongoing performance of FOREST to open (Feb 17) and close (Mar 3) the space collectively.

hosted by
shannon stewart + tahni holt

Sunday, February 18th, 10am

Special outdoor workshop by shannon stewart + tahni holt

Free and open to all interested, no prior movement experience necessary. Wear comfortable clothing and bring a notebook.

Couturie Forest, City Park, Meet in parking lot off of Harrison.

Saturday March 2nd, 12-5pm

Performances by Rebecca Allen, Wes Chavis, sierrah dietz, reese johanson

Sunday March 3rd

12-5pm - Performances by Rebecca Allen, Wes Chavis, reese johanson, Joanna Farley, garima thakur

2-3:30pm - FREE COMMUNITY WORKSHOP WITH RONI KATZ

A BIT LIKE A TREE - An invitation to wander 
Together and solo we will experiment with a simple score for hyper-perceptive wandering around the gallery while encountering the multitudes of sentient beings around and among us. We will give attention to textures, sensations and relations and let them deep into our bodies and our being. The other-than-human environment around the gallery will provide us with an abundant substrate for meeting, imagining, and nurturing. Through expanding our awareness and listening, we can ask what of ourselves can we offer to that which is everything. 

Practicalities: 
For registration and questions please send an email to Roni: ronronch@gmail.com

Please wear comfortable clothes and shoes that you are happy to walk in, we will spend most of the time outdoors. Depending on the weather you might need something for the rain, sunscreen, a hat. Please bring a notebook and a pen.

The session at The Front is the last of a series of workshops that interweaves practices of relating with movements and ecological consciousness. How can we spend time outdoors with the kind of attention and joy we cultivate through dancing? How can we move inside the studio with what we experience and sense when we venture into the outdoors?

Roni Katz is a choreographer and performer based in Berlin. Her work engages with the erotic, questions power, and moves through ecological forms. While consistently embodying personal-political matters, these elements shapeshift between formats of cabaret, film, performance, conversation and participation. Both collectively and solo, the work is driven by the necessity and desire to be in community, with and in relation to other human and other-than-human collaborators. The practice, slow and steady, brings into play embodied storytelling, sensualities, and subjectivities.

The workshops are part of “Planetary Practices”, a research asking what kind of dances emerge through reorienting with other-than-human rhythms, durations, beingness, and inhabitations. The research works with circular translation of knowledge to develop experimental formats for embodied encounters with one self, with each other and with the environment.

4pm - CLOSING PERFORMANCE WITH SERPENTINE CHOIR
–a queer femme choir dedicated to healing, pleasure and joyful forms of embodiment through the presence of song.

Serpentine choir will join the ongoing performance of FOREST to close the space collectively at 4pm.

Photo by Stephanie Tarrant

Serpentine choir

Room 1

The Curse of Eve - A Mixtape
Christine Crook

This project is about flesh and blood. It is about our bodies. More personally, it’s about my body, my womb, my ovaries dotted with fluid filled cysts the size of grapes or peanuts. It is about my shriveling unfertilized eggs, the clotted blood of my menstruation, and the cobwebs of endometrial tissue growing and roaming and wandering outside my uterus.

It is said, in the bible that God punished Eve with the pain of childbirth and of monthly menstruation. That God purposely separated man and woman, classifying woman as inferior and demanding her subservience to man. This is obviously a ridiculous set up for the patriarchal values and binary gender roles that dominate our world. This is also an example of the bible behaving as all myths do, using fanciful stories and supernatural events to influence our behavior and social constructs. Biblically, I prefer another creation myth, an earlier version that depicts the original human beings as dual-gendered entities, inherently equal in nature. Additionally, I find resonance in the lesser-known tale of Adam's first wife, Lilith, who refused to submit to subservience and chose her own path of independence, fleeing the confines of the Garden of Eden.

As an artist, I am captivated by fantastical stories, and my work is deeply rooted in the contemplation of folklore and ancient myths. The figures of Eve, Medusa, Mary, Lilith, Venus, Circe, Baba Yaga, and countless others occupy my thoughts. By examining the portrayal of women in these myths, we gain insight into the perpetuation of social structures and the origins of derogatory beliefs that cast women as evil temptresses, over-sexualized or infantilized objects, grotesque beings, or paradoxically, as pure, chaste, and virginal. It is a recurring dichotomy, the age-old trope of the virgin or the whore, which we all internalize to some extent.

The Curse of Eve is a Mixtape, a heartfelt dedication to my leaky vulnerable bag of skin, bones, and flesh. It is an immersive experience, akin to low rent cabaret or bad karaoke, it’s me drunkenly twirling alone within the confines of my dimly lit bedroom. With unrestrained abandon, I sing at the top of my lungs, embracing the weighty absurdity and contradictions inherent in the societal constructs that define my role as a woman. In this space, I embody the archetypes of a child, a mother, a virgin, a whore, the old and the young, the beautiful and the grotesque. It is a celebration of the multifaceted nature of womanhood, a testament to the fluidity and complexity of our identities.

To accompany this exploration, I invite you to listen to The Curse of Eve Mixtape on Spotify. May it inspire you to embark on your own drunken twirl, to find your own liberation within the music and embrace the complexities of our collective existence.

Christine Crook is a costume and performance artist based in New Orleans. Her wildly strange costumes and performance art are a recent divergence from a long established career in costume design for theatre, opera, and dance. Through this divergence she experiments with abstract costumes that re-imagine the structure of how design is utilized in performance, and offers a poetic interpretation of character through costume and other visual forms. Her recent studio work is inspired by traditions in drag, folk art, the occult, and global masquerade. These influences are often blended through an eccentric campy lens that celebrates women, and challenges stereotypes of gender, and sexuality. Christine’s work aims to allow the costume to exist on its own as a magical sculpture distorting and transforming the body of the wearer. Christine has presented design-driven live art and costume installations with Metalhaus Gallery, Failed Films Festival, Dream Farm Commons, FILF Fashion, Z Space, and Shotgun Players. She was awarded a Bridging The Gap Grant for continued experimentation with costume design funding a gallery residency in Berlin 2017. She also participated as an artist in residence with Light Box in Detroit 2019. Christine was born in Detroit Michigan, she has BA in Theatre Dance & Performance Studies from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Costume Design from UC San Diego.

Rooms 2 - 4

Forest image assembly by Rebecca Allen 

FOREST Performance Photos by Stephanie Tarrant.

FOREST
shannon stewart + tahni holt

a performance installation

Dense, vertical, tangled. Connective tissue to roots and branches, blood to sap, wood to bark and slowed down energetic tree pulse. FOREST is the first installation of a migrating movement research project done collectively in collaboration with our tree kin and each other.

Performers include: Rebecca Allen, Cypress Atlas, Wes Chavis, paris cyan cian, Sierrah Dietz, Joanna Farley, Ann Glaviano, Tahini Holt, Rhi Jade, roni katz, Leona Strassberg Steiner, shannon stewart, and Garima Thakur

*The practice of FOREST will be on view at the Front Feb 17 - Mar 3, performances happening throughout gallery open hours.

*Special performances Feb 17 & Mar 3 by Serpentine Choir
–a queer femme choir dedicated to healing, pleasure and joyful forms of embodiment through the presence of song.

*Community programming will be offered throughout the exhibition. More details to follow after Carnival.

For the past two years dance artists shannon stewart and Tahni Holt have woven their interests together creating a kinship in deeply researched embodied forms. It is a form of love and friendship that brings together creation and community, in a way that mirrors their individual practices as artists and organizers/builders in the respective places they live. Shannon and Tahni’s work resides in the study of interconnected systems–ecology, history, performative bodies (including non-human), and expansive understandings of communication. Together they have danced FOREST in Portland, OR, Lawrence, KS, and New Orleans, LA.