(Performance // Poetics is a series of poetics implanted in performance and media art curated by Housten Donham.)

Tom Trudgeon is an artist and writer from the San Fernando Valley. His work quizzes the ways in which everyday experience brushes up against limitlessness, primarily via video and monologue.

Andrew Shuta co-runs Spork Press, a DIY publishing house, and Everybody, a new art gallery in Tucson. His radiant multi-media work is typically drenched in glossy intensities.

Since 2014, the poet Mathias Svalina has run The Dream Delivery Service in Denver, Colorado. In the Fall of 2016 through the Summer of 2017 he will be delivering dreams (by bicycle) in other cities, including Richmond, Marfa, New Orleans & Chicago and here in Tucson! Says Svalina, “I (will) write the dreams, without consultation with the dreamer. Each dream is unique to the dreamer/subscriber. Svalina has chosen this creative mode because he wants “to develop a new rhetorical mode for a reader to encounter an extended writing work”. Look forward to a telling/reading of this mysterious and compelling project. Robert Yerachmiel Snyderman, Perin McNelis, and Isaac Swimmer will perform “Internal,” an adaptation of an autobiographical text documenting extreme hunger inside the Warsaw Ghetto by Leyb Goldin.

(Artists in Person)   

Celebrated California video artist Eric Saks visits Exploded View to present videos that investigate outsider mysteries and fractured narratives that wind through the Mojave Desert. Saks’ media practice has focused on phone phreaking, media jamming, gun control, hazardous waste, underground youth lifestyle, and spirituality. Saks will screen Creosote, You Talk/I Buy and the premiere of Eidolon (featuring EV fave Bill Daniel!) and more. Local artists duo Verbo•bala (Adam Cooper-Terán & Logan Phillips) employ poetry and video in their piece Sonoran Strange: Cemamagĭ Doʼag, a work that explores the duality of  indigenous knowledge versus colonial science in a ritualistic study of Tucson’s sacred Tumamoc Hill.

The Mystifying Works of J.G Ballard

(w/ Christopher Cokinos, Brad Schauer and Geoff Notkin in person! Live skype w/Juliette Lee)

Join poet, science fiction critic and nonfiction author Christopher Cokinos and his guests in a night of readings and films celebrating the work of visionary Sci-Fi writer, J.G. Ballard, including selections from CRASH and THE DROWNED WORLD.  Special screenings include the 1971 BBC hybrid video essay “Towards Crash”, a riveting BBC production called “Home,” based on the Ballard story “The Enormous Space,” and snippets from the disturbing film version of THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION.

 The first feature film by acclaimed photographer, Robert Frank is a portrait of the relationship between poet, Peter Orlovsky and his brother Julius, a catatonic schizophrenic. Orlovsky and mentor/lover Alan Ginsburg take Julius around the late 60’s counter-cultural scene until one day, a disappearance happens that alters the course of the film. This fascinating film-within-a-film (featuring a young Christopher Walken in the role of the director) blends fiction and reality to create a disorienting trip in which the idea of documentary truth is called into question.