Performance + Panel: The Embodied Press: queer abstraction and the artistsʻ book
Join us for a performance of Megan Adieʻs HUSH and Artist Panel for The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction & The Artist’s Book, curated by Anthea Black, October 14th, 3-5:30pm.
Performance of Megan Adie’s HUSH plus,
Curator Anthea Black in conversation with Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo and Nadine Bariteau
ASL interpretation will be available for the entirety of the event.
The artists’ book is a perfect form to experience the pleasures and politics of the handmade. Saturated ink spreading across a page. Layer upon layer. Looking that quickly opens up a range of senses. The Embodied Press features artist’s books and publications by queer and transgender artists, from graphic novels and collage-works to bold experiments with letterpress, screenprinting, video, performance, and risograph. Works from the 1970s to today overlap several successive chapters of LGBTQ+ and queer-feminist political action to expand our readings of contemporary queer culture. Artists in The Embodied Press make important visual and material choices in their use of printing techniques, sequencing, and manipulation or absence of text; they revel in visual abstraction as an antidote to the daily pressure of navigating our identities. What happens when a book “frustrates legibility” or becomes difficult to read? It must be felt. Held. Absorbed and activated. Each work poses questions about difference, intersectionality and power to show that sexual, gender and racial difference cannot be easily understood or legitimized through public visibility alone. These ideas find great resonance in the artists’ book field as it radically expands the ways books can be produced, read, and understood as a form of culture.
Curator Biography:
Anthea Black is a Canadian artist based in Toronto and the Bay Area. Black is curator of several exhibitions including SUPER STRING (2006), No Place: Queer Geographies, (2012-14), and PLEASURE CRAFT (2014) and co-editor of The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design (Bloomsbury, 2020) and HANDBOOK: Supporting Queer and Trans Students in Art and Design Education (OCAD University, 2018). Her studio practice addresses queer-feminist archives, collaboration, and artist-publishing, moving between representation and abstraction. Black has recently exhibited in Looking at the Invisible, Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, Loosely Assembled: The HIV Howler Intervention, SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montréal, HARDCORE EINDHOVEN, Van Abbe Museum, Netherlands, Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT, Belkin Art Gallery at UBC, Vancouver, and the Independent Curators International touring exhibition Publishing Against the Grain. She is Associate Professor of Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts at California College of the Arts, San Francisco.
Artist Biographies:
Megan Adie is a book artist and professional musician originally from California. Her imprint Aviary Press, and her work is in numerous public and private collections including the New York Public Library, Oxford (England) University Library, the Royal Danish Library, and Stanford University. Megan currently works as principal bass with Concerto Copenhagen, has a print shop in Copenhagen, and organizes EDITION/Basel, a residency program for international artists and printmakers.
Nadine Bariteau is a French-Canadian interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke). Her works spanning print, sculptur,e and performance, are studies of permanence and ephemerality and the interplay between human-made and natural environments. Bariteau has exhibited her work extensively, both nationally and internationally in China, Belgium, Argentina, Australia, United States, Russia, Taiwan, and Japan. Nadine presently lives on Vancouver Island on the traditional and unceded territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation.
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is an artist, activist, and educator,whose printed multiples, community-based work and installation building invite the viewer to recall and share their own lived narratives, offering power to the creation of a larger dialogue around telling B.I.Q.T.P.O.C. (Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, People of color) stories. Branfman-Verissimo has exhibited widely and held residencies and fellowships at The University of New Mexico, Black Space Residency, Women’s Studio Workshop and ACRE Residency. They currently live and work on Lenape and Mohican Land, also known as Hudson Valley, NY. Branfman-Verissimo is represented by September Gallery.
Event Details
Date: October 14, 2023
Time: 3:00 pm–5:30 pm
Kala Gallery
2990 San Pablo Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94702