Workshop with Owen Driggs, Evelyn Serrano, and Felipe Zuñiga

In his revolutionary essay The New Art of Making Books (1965, Mexico City), Ulises Carrion states that: “the introduction of space into poetry (or rather of poetry into space) is an enormous event, literally of incalculable consequences”.

Inspired by this powerful statement Economy of Gesture appropriates Sign Spinning – a contemporary advertising practice popular in southern California – to open a platform for experimentation and inquiry that asks who is authorized to speak in the city, how, when and where?

At LACE on August 26th, Owen Driggs, Evelyn Serrano and Felipe Zuñiga will discuss Economy of Gesture with Jules Rochielle of Portable City Project and offer a workshop. Owen Driggs will throw some interesting writing prompts to participants to explore possibilities in the coupling of image and word. Evelyn Serrano and Felipe Zúñiga will work on the formal production of the sign, utilizing various supports and materials to create unique signs, and the development of individual and group performative actions suited to each sign.
 
Anglo-American artist team Owen Driggs lives and works in Los Angeles. Team members have backgrounds in painting, sculpture, writing and curation and, individually, have exhibited around the world.
 
Evelyn Serrano is a Cuban interdisciplinary artist, educator, independent curator, community organizer, and mother currently living in Los Angeles County, California. Serrano obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, School of Art, in Valencia, California. www.evelynserrano.net

Felipe Zuñiga is a Mexican visual artist. lives and works in Tijuana, Baja California. Zuñiga obteined a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of California San Diego (UCSD) and Bachelor of Fine Arts ...

Join Mark Allen and Jen Smith as we explore DIY culture in Los Angeles along with other special guests.  Mark Allen will be speaking about the basics of starting your own (art/music/literature/whatever) space using Machine Project as an example.  Jen Smith will lead a pickling workshop where you can create your own pickled sensations.

Mark Allen is an artist, educator and curator located in Los Angeles. He is the founder and director of Machine Project (www.machineproject.com), a non-profit performance/installation space investigating art, technology, natural history, science and poetry.

Jen Smith is an artist and musician. With her post punk band the Quails, she has played music halls, street protests and squats, made posters, zines and anti-war ephemera and recorded three albums. She grew up eating industrial food. When she was a teenager, she endeavored to make a homemade pie, something she could not remember ever having eaten before. A month later, she swept the local county fair with her peach pie! She has been curious about food, how it is grown, the politics of its production and how it is prepared and eaten ever since. She has been making sauerkraut for many years and starting pickling in the summer of 2009 in homage to her recently deceased grandmother. She received her BA in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park and her MFA from the University of California, Irvine.

Come speak with writer/artist Yedda Morrison regarding her work, DARKNESS, as part of the Not Content series by Les Figues Press.

Yedda Morrison
Writer and visual artist Yedda Morrison was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Press, 2008) and Crop (Kelsey Street Press, 2003). Darkness (A Biocentric Reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) is forthcoming from Make Now Press in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in numerous anthologies and collections, most recently in The Book of Practical Pussies with artist Michelle Rollman, and Collective Task, edited by poet Robert Fitterman. Morrison has exhibited her visual work in the US and Canada, and is currently represented by Republic Gallery in Vancouver, BC. She lives in San Francisco. www.yeddamorrison.com

Not Content: Performance 3 with Johanna Drucker, Mathew Timmons, Yedda Morrison

Johanna Drucker, Yedda Morrison & Mathew Timmons performing from I AM WORDLE, DARKNESS and CREDIT!

These three are the next writers, curated by Les Figues Press, to perform with Not Content, a series of text projects that investigate the ways in which language functions within public and private spheres and within the tenuous and transitory space between these real and imagined realms. 

Johanna Drucker is an artist and writer who is known for her experimental typographic books and her critical writings on visual poetry, typographic history, and digital aesthetics. She teaches in the Information Studies Department at UCLA.

Writer and visual artist Yedda Morrison was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Press, 2008) and Crop (Kelsey Street Press, 2003). Darkness (A Biocentric Reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) is forthcoming from Make Now Press in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in numerous anthologies and collections, most recently in The Book of Practical Pussies with artist Michelle Rollman, and Collective Task, edited by poet Robert Fitterman. Morrison has exhibited her visual work in the US and Canada, and is currently represented by Republic Gallery in Vancouver, BC. She lives in San Francisco.
To learn more about Yedda's work, go to www.yeddamorrison.com

Mathew Timmons is General Director of General Projects in Los Angeles. His works include CREDIT (Blanc Press) an 800 page full color, large-format, hardbound book, and Lip Service, a chapbook published by Slack Buddha Press. The New Poetics from Les Figues Press, Sound Noise from Little Red Leaves, The Archanoids an album of solo and collaborative sound poetries from Pleonasm Music, and his micro-book collaboration with Marcus Civin, a particular vocabulary from P S ...

Public Action One: Supporting Public Libraries
every day this week August 16 - 23, from 6-7 PM

Take a moment to shout out on the Portable City audio blog, and to take action which will show your support of public libraries. Tell us why library doors should be kept open. This audio blog will become part of a week long action at LACE from Aug 16 - 23rd in front of LACE. Show your support of public libraries.

WWW | World’s Worst Words: Engaging People in Social Change through Performance w/ Slanguage
This workshop, led by Karla Diaz from Slanguage, asks audiences to engage in examining performance by guiding students to explore negative words in contemporary pop culture. Diaz will introduce drop-in audiences to a variety of performance techniques that Slanguage members use to critically explore content and context in an effort for social change. Participants will learn and practice performance techniques based on theater practices and spoken  word. Please expect to be participating physically at the level that is comfortable for you, and dress accordingly for movement.

Founded in 2002 by Karla Diaz and Mario Ybarra, Jr., Slanguage is an artist group headquartered in Wilmington, California, a harbor area of Los Angeles.  Currently, members make artwork, curate exhibitions, coordinate events, and lead art-education workshops.  A diverse group at various points in their careers, Slanguage includes teenagers, street artists, and established mid – to late career artists, the majority of whom live and work in the greater Los Angeles area, especially Wilmington.

Slanguage bases their practice on a three-pronged approach to art-making to include education, community-building, and interactive exhibitions.  Focusing on art education, the collective has organized numerous artist residencies in museums across the United States and abroad. Fostering dialog about the meaning and value of contemporary art, Slanguage has used their studio space and resources to cultivate relationships between diverse artists, students, communities, and organizations. And, creating artworks that have ranged from multimedia installations to performances, public events, and workshops, the collective has enriched, inspired, and provoked viewers’ imaginations through local, national, and international exhibitions.

Slanguage’s recent projects include Engagement Party, a three-month residency with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009); Sweeney Tate (2007) for the Tate Modern, London; and The Peacock Doesn’t See ...

Visit LACE on Friday, July 30th at 12:30 to see a public walk-through with writer/artist Jenny Donovan via Skype as she discusses her work with Gabriela Torres Olivares on Yo No Estoy Aqui as part of the Not Content portion of Les Figues' curation of Painted Over/Under.

To see more from Jenny and Gabriela, please visit their blog at yonoestoyaqu1.blogspot.com.

ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
Where do we locate what is not physically present? Where are we when we speak into a telephone?  Where we are when we are inside of the border and cannot get out?  That is to say, where is that which is not physically here due to circumstance rather than conviction.  The question, philosophically, is perceptual.  A is (physically) here and therefore not (physically) there.  B is (physically) there and therefore not (physically) here.  This perception stirs up the disjunctive between the Shakespearean to be or not to be and the there of a dinosaur that alienates us through fear because it is always there and never here (although it always is) in Augusto Monterroso’s story. The answer is a minifiction, a phrase whose past and future are uncertain within the constant present of a line, a marrow whose subjective skeleton is yet to be discovered: a virtual realm.

Yo no estoy aquí = yo soy aquí (I am not here = my presence persists here) because one concept cannot exist without the other. This project explores the process of virtuality as the answer to “where are you when you are not here?” That absence is the presence of absence: the emptiness that gives form to a figurative presence.  Everything that is not, so that something can become everything that is not here.  The present is everything that is but also that which is ...

Taking its name from the historic collaborative writing marathons led by Bernadette Mayer and others in NYC during 1972-73, Unnatural Acts will explore the themes of hunger, war, and desire through public acts of collaboration.  

Beginning with two days of installation and performance by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin, a group of ten writers/artists will gather on the third day to write together over the course of eight hours.  In a daily ritual inaugurated on the fourth day, the outline of a new person’s body will be traced onto the bodies of text until the exhibit closes on August 11th.

21 July 12-5pm: Installation, 5-5:30pm:  Performance of Hunger Texts Read in the Dark by Amina Cain

22 July 12-5pm: Installation, 5-6pm: Street Performance of 4000 Words 4000 Dead by Jennifer Karmin

23 July noon-8pm: Unnatural Acts 8 hours of collaborative writing. Collaborators include: Harold Abramowitz, Tisa Bryant, Amina Cain, Teresa Carmody, Saehee Cho, K. Lorraine Graham, Jennifer Karmin, Laida Lertxundi, India Radfar, and Mark Wallace.

24 July 2-3 pm, Artists' talk, 4-6pm: Collaborative Reading and Artists’ Talk.  Readers include: Harold Abramowitz, Tisa Bryant, Amina Cain, Teresa Carmody, K. Lorraine Graham, Jennifer Karmin, India Radfar, and Mark Wallace.

 Amina Cain is the author of the short story collection I Go To Some Hollow (Les 
 Figues Press, 2009), and a forthcoming chapbook, Tramps Everywhere (Insert
 Press/PARROT SERIES).  A recording of her story "Attached to a Self" was included
 in the group show A Diamond in the Mud at Literaturhaus Basel in Switzerland in
 2008; other work has appeared in publications such as 3rd Bed, Action Yes, Denver
 Quarterly, onedit, Sous Rature, and Wreckage of Reason: Xxperimental Prose by
 Women Writers.  She lives in Los Angeles.
 Visit Amina's website at aminacain.com
Jennifer Karmin’s text-sound epic, Aaaaaaaaaaalice ...