Children of Sirius: Artist Talk
Thursday, May 23, 2019 | 7-9pm | Free to Attend
Presented by 2019 Black Box Curatorial Fellow Malachi Lily
With Featured Artists Jordan Deal, Sabrina Pantal and Vitche-Boul Ra
On Thursday, May 23rd from 7-9pm, join 2019 Black Box Curatorial Fellow Malachi Lily for a conversation about their forthcoming presentation of Children of Sirius on Saturday, June 1st + Sunday, June 2nd, a two-part performance program exploring black divinity, mythology, extraterrestrial lifeforms, tangerines, survival, identity, the color blue, generational trauma, healing, and much more. Joining Malachi in conversation are featured artists Jordan Deal, Sabrina Pantal and Vitche-Boul Ra.
This talk is free to attend and serves as an introduction to the themes, processes and perspectives that went into shaping the Children of Sirius performance programs on Saturday, June 1st + Sunday, June 2nd.
About the Curator
Malachi Lily (they/them)
2019 Black Box Curatorial Fellow Malachi Lily is a shapeshifting, non-binary, black poet, artist, curator, and moth. They connect to the collective unconscious via energy work, active imagination, mysticism, myth, magick, folklore, and fairy tales. This channeling often takes the form of poetry and illustration, but at Vox Populi that work becomes curation as they connect to another artist’s energy and work beyond simply aesthetics. Malachi connects artists who are unconsciously vibrating together and uses their organizational skills to give them all a space to sing. Malachi’s curation forms a tangible permeation of a culture of Oneness – living in the reality that we all are manifestations of the same source energy and we all create our realities together. It is Malachi’s purpose to create space to uplift fellow black artists as gods, to bring balance and truth to their experiences. Malachi is a liminal being of race, gender, artistic practice, and existence reclaiming the spiritual body of black and brown people who experience generational trauma and colonization. Their work offers methods to break these individual barriers and reveals the symbols, archetypes, emotions, and lessons that exist in everyone as a collective consciousness, to heal, awake, and empower.
More information: maggielily.com / @theholyhawkmoth / @hawkmothevents
About the Artists
Jordan Deal (he/they)
Jordan Deal’s interdisciplinary practice merges sculpture, performance, painting and drawing, sound, and text play to create performance installations. Through the use of both worn and free-standing sculptures in his performances he interacts with the space questioning the interplay between the powers of race, gender, sex, and economic class. The work challenges the assumed roles of the body and aims to create dialogue around acknowledging and deconstructing micro-aggressions, while using play to explore relationship building between individuals and communities. His current work examines the dynamic between body and mind, physical and spiritual death and rebirth, role-play, and intimacy using characters he creates that transcend the normalities of sex and gender. Through this mode of storytelling, Deal confronts issues of conformity, submission and resistance, violence, and separatism.
More Info: @jordandealart
Sabrina Pantal (she/her)
Music has always been a form of expression for me. Being a self-taught musician has brought insecurity, but it also allows me to be more unique in the way I create. By combining trance-like melodies with layers of guitar, piano, and harmonies, I am able to translate more than just sounds that are pleasing to the ear. My lyrics are almost like spells that I cast and are usually based around the complexity of emotions that I feel throughout the many stages of my life. I like to explore and pull inspiration from different genres like jazz, psychedelic rock, soul, folk, and whatever else feels right in the moment. As a queer black woman deviating from the boxes that are put around the types of music we are “allowed” to produce, using this expression is very healing. I use these vibrations as a form of musical alchemy and hope that whoever is listening is left with feelings of peace and empowerment.
More Info: @soundsfromsabrina
Vitche-Boul Ra (he/him/vaïd)
In his primary studio practice, Vitche-Boul Ra utilizes recognizable dance language and colloquial gesture to develop performance works which manifest as play. The work applies irrationality in combination with the notion of dance as recreational labour to explore experiences of elitism and the mundane. Typically the performance attempts to unclearly articulate the relationship between performing body and viewing body. This is accomplished through language and spacial relationships—always building a matrix of power in flux with shifting accountability. Through repetition of gesture, doggy language, and direct questioning, Vitche-Boul Ra manipulates real time and recollection. He establishes a game inside the viewer, confronting them with their own memory, resulting in the reaffirmation of their securities while simultaneously destabilizing them. Can they follow, or better yet, aren’t they leading?. This technique opens up the performance space as a grounds for play—a hunting ground and a jungle gym.
Particularly in video, the works become unhinged playscapes for the body to occur in. Dealing with cyclicality, rhythm, antagonistic happenstance, and misplacement, Vaïd utilizes video space to generate unorthodox quests. Videoscape is used as a tool to reveal truths within the practice and furthermore immortalize the process of questioning, and questioning fictions, that becomes prevalent in the live performances. In this method, the body—and it’s baggage—are ejected from the “real” and placed into a dangerous site of scrutiny and imaginative intangibility. Vitche-Ra allows sound, dislocated text fragments, and muddy technicality to read the body to filth, resulting in a Digital Mysticism. Expanding this conversation into the quotidian self on the street, Vitche-Boul Ra investigates the many selves inside one form—the complexity of the physical body space. Experiencing his own body as a hosting vessel, Lix Vaïd reimagines the multiple self inside the corpus form as unstable to allow for abrupt transitions of linguistic style, cultural conditioning, and coded movement resulting in “P.E.”—the Performative Erryday [life].
More Info: @vitcheboulra
Support for Vox Populi’s Black Box Curatorial Fellowship is provided by the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation.
ACCESSIBILITY STATEMENT
Please note that Vox Populi is located on the third floor of a historic warehouse building at 319 N. 11th Street and that there are five steps leading from the street-level to the first-floor landing where the passenger elevator picks-up/drops-off. The entry into/out of the elevator is 29-inches wide, so may not accommodate all wheelchairs or motorized chairs. Any individual requiring a ramp to navigate this entryway is encouraged to get in touch with Vox Populi ahead of time to coordinate ramp-access and discuss accessibility details. Our ramps may not be suitable for all wheelchairs or motorized chairs, so we strongly encourage anyone requiring a ramp to be in touch at: events@voxpopuligallery.org or 215.238.1236
