Vox Populi and Aux Performance Space are pleased to announce a series of events in May, organized by Curatorial Fellow, Jamillah James. James is a New York-based curator who succeeds Marissa Perel, Aux’s Fall 2013 Curatorial Fellow. Over the course of two weekends in late May, James will present two performances, as well as an artist talk, and a keynote address and screening. June events will be announced at a later date.
Brooklyn-based performers Anya Liftig and Sophia Cleary present an evening of performance rooted in comedic and ecstatic engagements of the everyday, examining their lives as artists, and mining anxiety as a performative strategy.
Anya Liftig is a transpecies artist who is currently in the process of transitioning from human to canine. Her performance will explore the phenomenology of nature through John Milton’s maxim, “The way to know were not to see but taste.” Anya Liftig has performed extensively in New York, at venues such as Exit Art, The Kitchen, Grace Exhibition Space, Socrates Sculpture Park, Galapagos Art Space, The Flea Theater, Vaudeville Park, Joyce Soho, and the Center for Performance Research, among others. She has also shown work at Tate Modern, and [performance space] London; Performmer Stammtisch, Berlin; the Performance Art Institute, San Francisco; LAPSody, Helsinki; FADO Performance Art Centre, Toronto; INCUBATE, Defibrillator, and Mess Hall, Chicago; Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, California; Petit-Bain, Paris; OVADA, Oxford, United Kingdom; and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, among many others.
Her work, The Anxiety of Influence, was an intervention into Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present, the 2010 retrospective at The Museum of Museum of Modern Art, New York. Liftig’s work has been published and written about in the New York Times Magazine, Bomb, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue Italia, Marie Claire Italia, Heeb, Public Culture, Art Papers, ArtNews, The L Magazine, New York Magazine, X-tra, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, among others. She is a graduate of Yale University and Georgia State University and has received grant and residency support from the MacDowell Colony, Petersborough, New Hampshire; The Field, New York; Mertz Gilmore Foundation, New York; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont; Flux Projects, Atlanta; The Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna, Florida; University of Antioquia, Casa Tres Patios-Medellin, Colombia; and Flux Projects, Atlanta.
Sophia Cleary will present Female Figure II, a solo performance that cultivates sensitivity to an emotional body by acknowledging a persistent tension between performer and audience. A lecture-performance and dance, Female Figure II explores the specificity and nuance related to ways of speaking, and how the quality of the voice can misconstrue or amplify the words that are uttered. Sophia Cleary is a performance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the founder and coordinator of the works-in-progress series REHEARSAL and is co-editor for Ugly Duckling Presse’s performance annual publication, Emergency INDEX. She has worked with Neal Medlyn, Ann Liv Young, Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron), Vanessa Anspaugh, Alexandra Bachzetsis and the Kate Bush Dance Troupe. Her latest project is playing drums in Penis, a feminist punk band co-founded with Samara Davis. She has presented her work at New York venues the Bushwick Starr, the Center for Performance Research, Danspace Project, and Dixon Place. She holds an MA in Performance Studies from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Additional performers and participants may be announced at a later date. For more information, please visit voxpopuligallery.org, and follow Vox-Populi and AuxPhiladelphia on Facebook.
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The AUX Curatorial Fellowships have been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
