Children of Sirius: Day One
Saturday, June 1, 2019 | 7-9pm | $10
Featuring performances and installations by Jordan Deal, Alex Farr and Marcelline Mandeng
Curated by 2019 Black Box Curatorial Fellow Malachi Lily
No one turned away for lack of funds
Click here for information about Children of Sirius: Day Two on Sunday, June 2nd, featuring Vitche-Boul Ra, Oro Ori, Sabrina Pantal and Chlöe Marie.
Program Description
You may feel like you are lost, but you are exactly where you’re supposed to be. You have stumbled upon the Children of Sirius.
The gods have come down to revel in your concepts of time and dimensions. They come as black bodies, as expansive minds, as artists. This is a declaration, a feast, a war-cry, and a lullaby. Together these voices proclaim that their experience is divine. Their present existence is of their own creation; it is holy and infinite. This art is a particular form of self-love, an intimate awareness of a cosmic truth: They are creators. They come as shapeshifters, prophets, oris, ether, and beasts, all holy in their own eyes of god.
The Black Box, the scared cave, becomes an ephemeral place of pilgrimage for all people, but especially black people, with the intention of waking the divinity within the observer in this colorful and meditative place. Marginalization, trauma, and an engrained erasure is experienced as systems and passed generationally, but through collectivity within art and expression we can rewrite patterns and remember who we are. Each individual being’s experience is a direct manifestation of creation energy and therefore is never alone. Art, as the energy release of our universe, is never a solo process as we are unconsciously connected and influenced by each other, by other realities, by the earth, tangerines, the moon, star clusters, trout, smog, woven fabric, skyscrapers, gnats, the list is infinite.
The energy of each artist has found each other once again, and even your energy as observer has returned to us, you are welcome to ascend with the Children of Sirius.
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
Alex Farr (they/them)
I am passionate about art that moves its audience to be better to themselves and each other, art of love and reverence, art of conflict, art that is expressly aware of the ways in which popular culture passively and actively consumes blackness.
I ceaselessly aim to explode the idea of a monolithic black identity in favor of a more fluid, imperfect, colorful understanding of self, love, queerness, and queer blackness.
More Info: @justmadnice
Marcelline Mandeng (they/she)
Marcelline Mandeng is a Cameroonian born Black trans fem multidisciplinary artist based out of West Philly. As a cultural producer, they employ a variety of media such as performance, sculpture, video, music production and writing to archive deeply transformative aspects of their personal narrative centered around unearthing the divine, a process that began as an undergraduate at the Maryland Institute College of Art back in 2015. In their community based practice, they use this archive to trigger deep internal healing in other Black trans/non-binary folks as a reminder of the spiritual dimensions imbued in this identity. They’ve exhibited works at Macao Milano, Italy; Karma International in LA; MoMA PS1 in New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Headlong Studios here in Philadelphia to name a few places.
More Info: @twoheadedsphinx
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
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
