(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. Poet and playwright Robert Yerachmiel Snyderman will perform an adaptation of “Chronicle of a Single Day,” an autobiographical text documenting extreme hunger inside the Warsaw Ghetto by Leyb Goldin.

 + nightmare/dream related films by Su Friedrich and Stan Brakhage and more!

(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.

EV associate programmer, Carl Hanni presents an evening dedicated to the remarkable work of the expatriate writer, composer, ethnomusicologist and reluctant counter culture figure Paul Bowles. Bowles spent several decades living in Tangier, Morocco, while writing such now famous novels like “The Sheltering Sky” and “The Spider’s House,” while also hosting William S. Burroughs and other notorious literary outlaw figures. The evening will include a talk on his life and work, selections of music he recorded in Morocco, brief readings by Billy Sedlmayr  & John Melillo and accompanied by a screening of a fascinating documentary on Bowles.

Date:         Thursday, May 21st
Location:  Exploded View Micro-Cinema located at 197 E Toole Ave
Time:         6:00 -7:30PM it’s free admission!

Please join us in this fast, fun evening as TPAC’s New Works Artist Project Awardees (2014-2015)
The artist will present their artwork in the realm of visual arts, sculpture, interdisciplinary arts, literature and playwriting.  Milta Ortiz presents a live excerpt from her docu-theater script Más, based on the banning of Mexican American studies in the Tucson Unified School District; David Sherman’s documentary film Son Blues explores the music and emerging consciousness of a young Tucson musician; Catherine Eyde explores the evolution of her paintings and drawings when she designedly invited her 8 year old daughter Aria into her art; Ben Johnson explores the ancient practice of honeybee domestication and the bond between humans and bees in an interdisciplinary work; Shloka Mangharam Ettna shares new illustrations from her mixed media children’s book Amalla Dreamypants Learns to Fly ; Adan Banuelos discusses his kinetic sculpture inspired by lowrider car culture; and based on news reports of the murders of 85 transgender people in recent years, TC Tolbert creates a series of erasure poems that examine the relationship between violence against trans people and the language used to represent them in the media.

The New Works Grant provides support to individual artists residing in Tucson and Pima County for projects that employ innovative approaches to art, while meeting the highest standards of excellence.

Photo credits (clockwise from top left):  Red Shoes, mixed media on canvas, by Catherine Eyde,  photo by Wilson Graham; Beekeeping, by Ben Johnson; mixed media illustration from the book  Amalla Dreamypants Learns to Fly, by Shloka Mangharam Ettna.

https://www.facebook.com/events/810151625745262/

MEDIA SHAMANISM

Films & Poetry of Ira Cohen

EV Associate Curator, Carl Hanni guides us through the life and work of poet, photographer, filmmaker, publisher and legendary shaman/bohemian Ira Cohen. Ira Cohen lived and created a singular body of work in New York City, Tangier and Katmandu from the 1960s until his death in 2011. His contemporaries included William S. Burroughs, Angus MacLise (Velvet Underground), Gerard Malanga, Charles Henri Ford and Paul Bowles. EV will screen Cohen’s transcendent The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda and Kings With Straw Mats. In Kings With Straw Mats, Ira Cohen is both participant and observer to an extraordinary parade of people on pilgrimage into the heart of one of India’s greatest sacred celebrations, the Kumbh Mela. With the eye of a filmmaker and the voice of a poet, Cohen introduces an array of holy men as they gather for the event, which occurs only once every 12 years.