Center for Experimental Lectures presents Edie Fake, Jamillah James, and Alexis Blair Penney at MoMA PS1

Center for Experimental Lectures present

Edie Fake, Jamillah James, Alexis Blair Penney

Hosted by MoMA PS1

Sunday November 18, 2012 2pm

www.experimentallectures.org

The Center for Experimental Lectures is thrilled to invite you to attend lectures by Edie Fake, Jamillah James, and Alexis Blair Penney, hosted by MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York as part of the museum’s Sunday Sessions program.

Artist Edie Fake’s lecture The Sexual Life of Patterns explores the concept of “the weave” in relation to textiles, gender, and the trans body. Extending the logic of intuitive herbalism, magic, and tarot into textile decoration, ornamentation, and repetitive pattern, Fake’s lecture will explore the physical meaning of patterns that are integral (woven in) and imposed (printed on). Fake proposes patterning as about the interaction of bodies—tessellating patterns as trans, stripes as individuals, paisley, plaid, checks, and so on. Fake provides an idiosyncratic and illuminating read of the intersections between gender, sexuality, textile, and patterning.

Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 2002 and has since clocked time in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Baltimore. His visual art work, dealing heavily with the confluence of love and fury in queer utopian visions, has been shown at LACE in Los Angeles, Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn, and Gallery 400 at UIC Chicago. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter's Awards for Artists and his drawings have been included in Hot and Cold and LTTR. His first book,Gaylord Phoenix, won a 2010 Ignatz Award for Best Graphic Novel. He currently lives in Chicago and works as a small press sommelier for Quimby's Books. Fake presented The Sexual Life of Patterns at the inaugural event of the Center for Experimental Lectures in Chicago in December 2011.


Drag performer, artist, and writer Alexis Blair Penney’s lecture, Window, will incorporate elements of a traditional lecture with publicly enacted ritual and drag-performance. Structured around the five points of a star, Penney invites the audience through a portico into the performer’s mind by conjuring and embodying five diva archetypes: Madonna as she presented herself in Truth or Dare and Ray of Light; the character of Karrakaz from the famous science fiction book The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee; poet and folk icon Joni Mitchell; Barbara Streisand’s depiction of Esther Hoffman in the 1976 rock musical film A Star Is Born; and the anti-diva—patriarchy—as manifested in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. Penney connects the points of the star with the thread of reflections about his own mother, and locates the audience as the anchor that enables the diva-performer to be possible at all.

Alexis Blair Penney has performed in and curated numerous acclaimed drag nights in San Francisco and New York, and currently is the creator, host, and curator of the drag revue Chez Deep at Santos, which has been nominated for Best Party in Paper Magazine's 2012 Nightlife Awards, while also helming the drag house of the same name. Alexis is a frequent collaborator/back-up singer in SSION, in addition to currently performing with the band Icewater, including a recent gig at the Bowery Ballroom, with singles available domestically and internationally, via Ecstasy Records and Big Love Records. Alexis was a featured performer in the show Next Time at White Box in NYC, and performed at this year’s Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s TBA Fest, with a live taping of this event to be aired online as a documentary in conjunction with Alexis’ next album (a collaboration with Nick Weiss and Jamie Crewe, also out via Ecstasy) and book (to be published by Peradam). Alexis is currently working on conceptualizing, writing, and scoring a futurist socio-political animated musical webcomic with the artists Rhett Larue, Sam Cormier, Jamie Crewe, Lauren Devine, and Bruno Coviello, and working as a freelance writer for V Magazine.

Curator Jamillah James’ lecture, Comic Relief: On Art and Television, explores the ways that the art world and artists are depicted in popular culture, particularly in television series and the occasional film. James is interested in the comedy that ensues as a result of those representations, as well as what we can gather from them by way of understanding the way our culture perceives art and artists. James mines the unsettling moment when her televisual therapeutic escape from art world labor is interrupted by programming that forces a reconciliation of her professional reality with popular culture's representation of this reality, the latter of which becoming an unintentional, but no less potent, form of reflection and institutional critique.


Jamillah James is a curator based in New York. She is currently the Curatorial Fellow at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and edits the blog FRONTIERS. Recent exhibitions and projects include Primary, Nudashank, Baltimore; Dirty Looks: On Location, New York; Three Points Make a Triangle: Queens International 2012, Queens Museum, New York; Not the Way You Remembered, Queens Museum; and Repeating Forms, Walters Museum, Baltimore. Upcoming projects include exhibitions at NurtureArt, Brooklyn (January 2013) and The Studio Museum in Harlem (March 2013). She holds a BA in Critical Studies from Columbia College, Chicago.


The Center for Experimental Lectures is a platform for artists, theorists, and other cultural producers to push the boundaries of the public lecture format. The Center for Experimental Lectures curates and archives regular lecture events in a variety of venues with hopes of providing occasion to think about not only the content of each unique lecture but also the possibilities of the lecture as a creative form. The physical presence of the lecturer is a rich site for embodied and performed meaning making, and the Center for Experimental Lectures encourages the creation of new forms of experience-based information dissemination. The Center is directed by artist R. E. H. Gordon. Please visit www.experimentallectures.org or email [email protected] for more information.