Siren & cherished husks!
Friday April 11th 8pm, Free!
Infinity Mirror, the current exhibition on view in Black Box, brings together the two distinctive and poetic worlds of frequent collaborators and Chicago-based artists, Odette Stout and Ále Campos (aka Celeste). Both are multidisciplinary performance makers and experimental drag artists with hands and hearts steeped in the universes of performance art and underground drag and fashion nightlife. Siren is a ritual performance from multimedia and drag artists Ále Campos and Odette Stout, fusing drag, tattoo, augmented reality and poetry with live original sound by Spacey Lacey. This presentation of Siren is made possible with support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Hop is making songs in fascination with ways of being 'yourself' and being multiple both by desired and undesired identification. Textures and characters of joy and horror dance. A sweaty dream of bubbles opens spiny slicks of oil into stoner seas. Hop will perform cherished husks!, bringing new music and dancing into Emmanuela Soria Ruiz's solo exhibition Fuego/ Fuga! and connecting to themes of transformation, horror, and wonder.
About the Artists
Odette Stout is a reality artist and drag performer whose experimental costumes are a staple in Chicago underground nightlife. They stage intermedia performances that cast collaborating artists as otherworldly living artworks, called on to help tell stories from spaces where self-creation is a survival art practice. Stout’s runway events synthesize fashion, digital installation, dance, drag and poetry and are designed to catalyze embodied experiences of an ever-present possibility of transformation.
Stout teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Exhibitions and partners include The Sculpture Center, CURRENTS, Ars Electronica, Co-Prosperity, MOCA Cleveland, Kinsey Institute, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, 3Arts.
Ále Campos (b. 1994, Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist and performance maker whose elastic studio practice is anchored in the vernacular of drag and their persona, ‘Celeste’. They generate live performance works that are often rhapsodic and mediated by technology, often involving or unfolding into the mediums of sculpture, sound, text, video and installation. Drag is a queered method through which they consider performance making.
Campos received a BA from Bennington College (2016) and an MFA in Performance at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2022). Some places their work has been show at include Elastic Arts, SITE/less, Hyde Park Arts Center (Chicago, IL), BMOCA (Boulder, CO, SS Gallerie (CDMX), Pamplemousse Gallery (Richmond, VA), Crab Shack x Fjord (Philadelphia, PA). They were a 2023 BOLT artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition and were named one of the ten New City 2023 Breakout Artists of Chicago. They currently hold the title of resident performer & co-producer of Rumors, a monthly event that showcases some of the city’s premiere performers and DJ’s.
Hop is a music and sound maker who lives in rural New Jersey. They are a co-founder and director of Studio Route 29, and founder of Beauty Music.