Irrational Exhibits 13: Juxtaposing Terrains

An evening of Durational Performance, Video, Sound Art, and Photography

Curator/Producer Deborah Oliver, Associate Curator/Producer Jerod Thompson

October 26, 2024 - One night only

7:00 p.m - 9:00 p.m | Free entry

with Post Show Reception

at five galleries in the Bendix Building

1206 Maple Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90015

Floors 1, 5, & 8

PERFORMANCE | VIDEO | SOUND SCULPTURE | PHOTOGRAPHY

at the Bendix Building in five galleries including:

Track 16 1^st Floor | Tigers Strikes Asteroid | Monte Vista Projects 

Gallery 515 | Durden and Ray

Participating Artists: christy roberts berkowitz, Claudia Bucher, Joana P. Cardozo, Maria Adela Diaz, Kiyo Gutierrez, Ulysses Jenkins, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, Ibuki Kuramochi, Simon Leung, Cade Moga, Andrea Nhoch, Mehregan Pezeshki, Saun Santipreecha, Mark Steger, Raymond Tran-Nguyen, Sichong Xie, and Kim Zumpfe

Irrational Exhibits 13: Juxtaposing Terrains features live performance art, video, sounds sculpture, and photography that critically engages with the temporal and sociopolitical complexities of our current era. "Juxtaposing Terrains" serves as a platform for these artists to examine the delicate balance between historical precedents and prospective futures. Through the lens of durational performances, moving images, and photographic works, they provide a nuanced discourse on the precarious nature of our present moment. The exhibition focuses on the corporeal and temporal dimensions of these artist’s works, inviting viewers to consider meaning through their use of gesture, action, materiality, and sound.

The spatial layout of the exhibit allows for a close engagement with the artist’s work, creating an immersive experience that extends beyond traditional exhibition methodologies. As the audience members traverse the five galleries and three floors of the Bendix Building, they encounter performances, installations and sound sculpture that occupy not only the gallery spaces but also the transitional areas of the hallways. This strategy promotes a continuous dialogue between the artists and the audience, blurring the boundaries between observer and the observed.

Join us on October 26th, the durational performances start at 7:00 PM, with a post-show reception at 9:00 PM on the 5th floor. 

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 13: Juxtaposing Terrains, Curator/Producer, Deborah Oliver with Jerod Thompson, Associate Curator/Producer. This exhibition is made possible with the curatorial consultation and production assistance from Carl Baratta, Gul Cagin, Sean Meredith & Caesar Delgadillo, HK Zamani and Debra Broz, and made possible with generous support by University of California, Irvine Research Funds, Track 16, Monte Vista Projects, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Gallery 515, and Durden and Ray. 

Exhibiting Artists:

christy roberts berkowitz explores personal and collective constructions of power. roberts berkowitz (whose name includes her maternal family’s surname and is intentionally presented in lowercase) is in her second year as Creative Strategist for the Los Angeles County Department Arts and Culture and the LA County Department of Human Resources. She is a 2023 Creative Corps grant recipient and is President/CEO of KCHUNG Radio (a 2016 Creative Capital Award recipient and 2022-23 artist-in-residence and current partner at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles). She has exhibited with MOCA Los Angeles, The Getty Museum, The Telfair Museum, The Chrysler Museum, REDCAT, The Hammer Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. 

Past residencies include the IMMENSIVA AI/XR Residency for Espronceda Institute of Art & Culture, Feminist Field School at the Centre Pompadour Neofeminist Institute in France, and a Glass Residency at the Chrysler Museum (2018). Her essays, reviews, and poetry have been commissioned and published by numerous publications. Glitzer, her experimental electronic music project, has one full-length project (“Score”) and she released her debut album “WOLVES,” co-produced by four-time Grammy® winner Jahi Sundance, under the name “christy” in August 2022 on Alpha Pup Records.

Is That Better? In “Is That Better?” intermedia artist, christy roberts berkowitz, explores and inverts the famous meme, “This is fine.” A universal joke, at its surface, about what we’re willing to accept, the meme rose to viral fame in the last several years during the rise of fascism and the widespread systemic failures to address global tragedies such as climate crisis, COVID-19, and ongoing colonial war practices. In its inversion, the installation and durational performance presents the possibility of dismantling the paradigms we have accepted in favor of the consensus of material negotiation.

Claudia Bucher is a conceptual artist working in performance art, sculpture, and installation art. She creates imaginative philosophical speculations, often in response to current events, that revel in the intersections between art, architecture, science and technology, ecology, mysticism, feminism, and science fiction. She has been exhibiting her work around the Southern California region for over 30 years. She currently lives in Yucca Valley, CA.

To the Air Born? DAY OF THE DAEMON (Deliberating Anemochore Embryos Manifesting

Ontological Noesis) from October 20, 2019 (5 mins, 25 secs) is a location-specific wind inspired project that contemplates agency in the not-yet-born. Created during a residency at Buckwheat Space in Morongo Valley, CA and presented during the 2019 Hwy 62 Open Studio Art Tours, the prochoice artist had (presciently) become alarmed by a spate of legislative attacks on reproductive rights throughout the country and felt compelled to dive deeper into a contemplation of self-determination, consent and the presumptuousness of the living regarding the ontology of nascent

fertilized forms. 

Inspired by the forceful crosswinds specific to the location, Bucher looked to wind-driven phenomena to shape the expression of the work. This led her to combine a fascination with the class of wind-dispersed organisms known as anemochores, such as dandelions, with the equally mesmerizing kite forms created for the Guatemalan Giant Kite Festival in celebration of the Day of the Dead.

Joana P. Cardozo is a Brazilian visual and performance artist based in Los Angeles. Her practice is rooted in rituals and spirituality, exploring ideas of mortality, domesticity, and identity. Cardozo has most recently exhibited at the Brazilian Consulate in LA, Lois Lambert Gallery (Santa Monica), Helen J Gallery (LA), Bareiss Gallery (Taos), photo l.a. (LA), the Texas Contemporary Art Fair (Houston), and Rencontres d'Arles (France). Her projects have received support from The Watermill Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Santa Monica Cultural Affairs, The New York Foundation for the Arts among others, and she received an MFA from CalArts (2022).

FREE RELATIONSHIP ADVICE is an offering of my presence and time. It derives from fortune-telling practices' intimate yet transactional nature by which a stranger offers guidance and predictions, often based on esoteric knowledge or personal experience. The trust placed in these individuals, despite their anonymity, speaks to a deep human desire for connection and understanding, even in unconventional settings. This parallels the vulnerability and hope inherent in seeking relationship advice, blurring the lines between personal and performative acts.

Maria Adela Diaz is a multidisciplinary Latinx artist, born in Guatemala. Diaz uses her body as a medium to convey her political deceptions, patriarchal, immigration and discriminating philosophies, with performance, installations, and video, her work points out issues that deal with the Latin American diaspora. Diaz has participated in many art exhibitions worldwide: Centre Pompidou, Paris France, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, México City, Museum of Contemporary Art, San José Costa Rica, Somerset House, London UK, among others. Diaz lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Borderline, talks about the politics and the effect it produces on the emotional state of human beings when they are denied the right to freedom to anyone. It has been shown that the position of immigrant women in society are more likely to be victims of a greater degree of racial discrimination and violence, therefore in Borderline, by subjecting my body to the dramatic movement of the waves of the sea, I expose my feeling of nausea and sickness of migration. Remaining vulnerable and invisible to the eyes of the beholder. 

Participants are encouraged to join this ongoing process by interacting with an outer layer of gauze, symbolically peeling back the surface to reveal and confront the underlying threads of violence. It's an invitation to not only witness but actively participate in the dissection and dissolution of harmful structures that perpetuate violence in various forms.

Kiyo Gutierrez is a Mexican artist who studied history but couldn’t find any answers in heteropatriarchal narratives. In response to the violent and brutal reality of her country, Kiyo turned to performance art. She discovered her path was in the body and its potential as a tool of resistance. Her work spans multiple mediums, including video, photography, textiles, sculpture, and sound. Through her performance-rituals, she challenges established orders and power structures, while nurturing the possibilities of multispecies alliances.

Kiyo performs often in public spaces and has participated in International Performance Festivals and exhibitions in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Spain, Italy and the United States. She also participated in Debates, an editorial project for Colección Cisneros, she is a Fellow at the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics of Georgetown University, a recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund, the Fulbright Scholarship and was recently nominated for the Gilder/Coigney International Theatre Award. She is currently studying her MFA at University of Southern California.

whore/parasite is a ritual performance informed by post-humanist materialist theories, hydrofeminism and indigenous knowledge that employs sound, movement, and wearable sculpture. The tongue of the nahua interpreter La Malinche, the mouth of the ancient fish, the Pacific Lamprey, L.A river water, natural dying and concrete are woven in this ritual that gathers stories of extinction, colonization, resistance and collaborative survival. The voices of two historically neglected creatures, one considered a whore, the other a parasite, return through friction accompanied by the sound of petrified water, to reopen our watery imagination and spawn spaces where the boundary between human and more-than-human entities is constantly blurred, expanded and inhabited.

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.

‘Sins of the Father’ is a video griot performance which interprets a song by the Othervisions Art Band: which tells the history of the right-wing notions starting from the assignation of President Abraham Lincoln on through to the current conservative political movements! These are the sinister activities of the various negative activities on this planet. The performances of griots often involve relaying the history and genealogy of a particular group.

Marcus Kuiland-Nazario is an interdisciplinary artist, producer, and curator. His practice spans sculpture, video installation, social practice, and performance. Kuiland-Nazario’s works are long-term research-based cross-genre projects exploring extreme states of emotion such as grief, anger, and loss influenced by the cultural and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora. His installations and performances have been featured in museums in the United States and abroad. Kuiland-Nazario is the 2024 inaugural recipient of the Jacki Apple Award in Performance. He also received the Santa Monica Artist Fellowship award and an Artist at Work Fellowship. Kuiland-Nazario is a founding artist of the 18th Street Arts Center, where he is currently an Artist in Residence.

Threnody is an interdisciplinary performance/installation exploring grief, loss, and funerary traditions inspired by COVID-19 and the AIDS Pandemic. The performance/installation is created from one-on-one performances and materials created and gathered in public programs, workshops, and collaborations. For Irrational Exhibit, Marcus will perform an excerpt of the larger work - one on one interactions with audience members. Threnody was developed during a residency at the Coaxial Arts Foundation and funding provided by the Jackie Apple Fund. Grave Gallery will be presenting Threnody during the winter of 2024/2025. 

Ibuki Kuramochi is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist whose work spans Butoh dance, performance, video, installation, and painting. She has exhibited internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Rome, and more. Since 2016, Kuramochi has studied Butoh under Yoshito Ohno at the Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio, exploring the physicality of the body and its metamorphic potential. Her practice is rooted in themes of embodiment, transformation, the female body, and feminism. In 2019, she was featured on the front cover of LA WEEKLY's "People" special issue. Recent exhibitions include the Torrance Art Museum and Spring Break Art Show LA. 

The Cycle is a performance art that explores the complex and cyclical nature of female reproductive function through the symbolic representation of ovulation, the egg, and the uterus. The otherness of Butoh dance and the interplay of visceral movement and physicality define the female body, biology, and reproductive journey.

Simon Leung was born in Hong Kong, and lives mostly in the 20^th Century. His performance-oriented practice includes a live/video performance addressing AIDS in the figure of the glory hole; context-specific projects centering on the squatting body as a heuristic cipher; “art workers’ theater” dealing with the intersection of art, labor, and education; an internet performance for the pandemic age; and an extended opera project, the latest segment of which was on view in the exhibition "Scratching at the Moon" at ICA LA in 2024. Leung is Professor of Art at UC Irvine, where he heads the New Genres area.

Packing Fountain is a single channel video filmed in 1993, exhibited in 1996. "Packing Fountain” is a single channel video from Simon Leung's on-going project to re-pose “the Duchampian” as a discourse in ethics.

Cade Moga is a gender-non-conforming artist from Curitiba, Brazil, working in Portuguese and English across film, installation, and performance. Cade received a BFA from Otis College of Art & Design after immigrating to Los Angeles. Influenced by the intersections of queerness in Body Horror Cinema and Magical Realism in South American Literature, Cade creates unprecedented trans-inclusive contexts for words like Erotic, Feminist, and Brazilian.

Fair-Trade Asks Can any form of trade ever truly be equitable for all parties involved? ‘No Fair Trade’ is a durational act drawing upon my experience navigating various trades since immigrating to LA. The performance questions the notion of "fair trade" as it applies to the exchange of goods that are labeled as "fairly" or "sustainably" manufactured. This inquiry extends to financial values attributed to labor, particularly those undertaken by women, immigrants, trans folks, and sex workers. Since the performance cannot be accomplished without the audience’s participation, the ultimate question is whether it is fair for The Artist to outsource their labor.

Andrea Nhuch is a multidisciplinary visual artist focusing on sculpture, installation, and performance. Nhuch explores relationships between the human and non-human in our contaminated world. She accepts that we are living in times beyond remediation and uses materials to speculate about posthuman futures. Informed by her background in the beauty industry, Nhuch investigates the kinship between chemicals and bodies: human, animal, ocean, air, etc. Her work is about resilience, adaptation, and ultimately collaboration with contamination for survival. She studied at Art Center College of Design (MFA), was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Some Form of Future Nature is Andrea Nhuch's post-anthropocentric performance, translating eco-anxiety into speculative art. Nhuch's lower legs and feet perform in a tiny, raised garden lit in purple grow lights. The work zooms in the relationship between her body and soil. It explores the entanglement between humans and nonhumans, speculating about a new form of nature resulting from human activity. Nhuch's limbs stumble on plastic growing in her garden, and emotion ensues through non-narrative choreography and sound. The piece challenges our complex relationship with the environment by offering a nonhuman perspective on nature. Blending peep show aesthetics and absurdity, "Some Form of Future Nature" provokes critical reflection on our ecological future and the unseen consequences of our human-centered perspective.

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 and performance to uncover hidden behavior that affects our daily lives. She employs an unconventional angle that challenges the viewers to step out of their comfort zone and observe human behaviors from a new perspective. Pezeshki holds a BA in Conservation and Preservation of Historic Buildings from the Cultural-Heritage University of Tehran, a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from the California Institutes of The Arts. 

Shattering Shadows explores the dynamics of close relationships that can become sources of suppression and harm despite being rooted in care and love. Charcoal portraits represent the darkness these figures unknowingly impose as they attempt to control and correct the person. Smashing the sculptures symbolizes breaking the idolized versions of these individuals to reclaim the power within—the god within—allowing for rebirth and personal evolution. The release of vibrant colors is defined by one's terms, free from harmful constraints and filled with positive influences. 

Saun Santipreecha is an interdisciplinary artist and composer (b. 1989, Thailand) who works across and between disciplines and art forms, often at the intersection between image, language, sound and body. He has had two solo exhibitions at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles (2023, 2024) as well as a solo exhibition in Rome (2024). He recently had his first institutional commission for a sound and sculpture installation in the ADN East German guardhouse at the Wende Museum (2024). He is based in Los Angeles and continues to work with artists and specialists across disciplines including film, fashion, and performing arts. 

Avant le deluge, après le rêve (Before the flood, after the dreams) is built from and through elements both past and present—a relationally modular work. Like the displaced movement of symbols, the visual component of this sound sculpture is co-opted, dislodged in time, scored anew through the tension between concrète sounds of this city and the hallucinatory dreams it propagates. The title itself brackets time (ours and the work’s—frames us in befores and afters), creating a container of Time. At once foreign and intimate, this topology arrests our perception of what is perceived through an excavating act of translation.

Mark Steger is an actor, choreographer and director. He has worked in feature films, television and live performance. Honors include a Screen Actors Guild Award for his portrayal of the Demogorgon in the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, the California Arts Council Fellowship, the Durfee Artists Award and made multiple Los Angeles Times year end “10 Best” performances lists. Roles in film and television include “The Pact,” “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” and “Westworld. Mark was movement director/choreographer for “American Horror Story,” “World War Z,” and “I Am Legend.” He has created experimental shorts, music videos, and the first multimedia online comic book, Gearbox. Recent live work includes solo performances in Walls and Covert Agent at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, choreographing Cassils' Powers That Be at the Broad. Mark was co-director of the performance group osseus labyrint, which explored the history of the body, navigating realms where science and art intersect. 

Imago is a short film by Mark Steger who has devoted his life to working in film, video, live performance and visual art. At the heart of his work is the language of the body, which he sees as a fluid, intelligent, and liminal form. 

Raymond Tran-Nguyen is an interdisciplinary photographer based in California, specializing in the concepts of masculinity and sports. Drawing from his personal experiences, Raymond infuses his work with deep insights into male identity and athleticism. As a former athlete, he brings a nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between sports and personal identity. His photography explores the mental and emotional dimensions of athleticism, addressing the psychological challenges and underlying issues that athletes encounter. This focus on the internal struggles and pressures of sports naturally intersects with his exploration of masculinity. Raymond examines how the mental aspects of athletic performance connect to broader concepts of male identity. He is keenly interested in the narratives of masculinity in contemporary society and critiques its role by highlighting issues that reveal the evolving nature of male identity. 

Masculinity: Fragility and Defensiveness explores the struggles of displaying vulnerability within the confines of traditional masculine constructs. This work delves into the fear and discomfort associated with expressing fragility as a man, and how such expressions can provoke defensive reactions both internally and externally. The subjects’ confrontation with the camera highlights the psychological impact of being observed while grappling with their fragility. Central to this exploration is the use of water as a symbolic element. Being soaked and physically uncomfortable underscores the unease of revealing one’s true self. By confronting both the discomfort of physical exposure and the scrutiny of the camera, "Masculinity: Fragility and Defensiveness" invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries of strength and vulnerability in modern masculinity.

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 re-consider 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, CA. She is the recipient of the 2022 MAP Fund Award and the 2021 Artadia Los Angeles Award. Her most recent installation “Memory Structure, Scaffold Series” at the Wende Museum in Los Angeles, features objects and arrangements emblematic of memory and temporality: bamboo scaffolding, embroidery on industrial mesh, and a set of laser-engraved drawings that will fade from continual exposure to light, through which she reimagines architectural drawings created by her grandfather in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This installation brings the materiality of the natural bamboo into direct conversation with the mass-produced nature of the scaffold and its role in development. She 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. 

You Can’t Take That Away From Me, Jumping Series I (Valencia, CA), 2017; You Can’t Take That Away From Me, Jumping Series II (Xi'an, China), 2017; You Can’t Take That Away From Me, Evening Series V (Xi'an, China), 2018 are from a performative photography series that 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, I investigate these forms and movements within global communities to re-consider and re-envision shared spaces and performative practices. Personal becomes political. To reflect the patriarchal society in China, I imitate historical monuments, such as statues of Chairman Mao, while taking multiple photos of myself jumping in the air with a handmade fake Louis Vuitton Communist suit. I want to create something absurd to question reality: Which one is more real, the sculpture of the patriarchal figure or the person jumping? Is the surreal man-made landscape more real or the ghostly jumping figure? There is humor in my work, but I want people to realize the gravity and profundity of the issues behind the absurdity.

Kim Zumpfe is an intermittent artist, educator, and writer. Solo and collaborative exhibitions include Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), MOCA Geffen, Bangkok Biennial’s MAHA Pavilion, Gallery TPW (Toronto), Diverseworks (Houston), San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Audain Gallery (Vancouver), Human Resources, and the Mexicali Biennial. Zumpfe has been recognized through a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts best in international feminist art and scholarship, a Franconia Sculpture Park Fellowship, and a commission at Grand Central Art Center. Zumpfe currently co-produces VOIDWAVE, a radio program that features experimental sound works by femme, queer, and non-binary artists. 

Power of the Powerless is a work that considers social and political consequences of ‘design-by-unit’ furniture created to allow for affordable, functional, and disposable convenience. The furniture collected from the streets of Los Angeles contends with questions of how standardizations reflect on the interior lives of individuals who experience a hyper-mobile, boundaryless, post-freedom construct of home. Pantone’s 2024 color of the year, Peach Fuzz, shows a colorist schematic embedded in standards of prescribed taste, part of the ecology of home displaced into units and categories. The title refers to a writing by Czech playwright and reluctant politician Václav Havel, addressing the possibility of dissent in a social paradigm where individuals contribute to a post-totalitarian machine.