E18: Performance Art

Alexander D’Agostino, Imogen-Blue Hinojosa, Katie Macyshyn, Sedna, Sifu Sun

July 17 - August 14, 2021

Transformer is excited to share the public component of E18: Performance Art - the 18th year of our Exercises for Emerging Artists program – an annual peer critique and mentorship program for DMV-based emerging artists. Centered on a different artistic discipline each year, E18: Performance Art is supporting and promoting five performance-based artists as they debut new performances, live in the public sphere. E18: Performance Art artists include: Alexander D’Agostino, Imogen-Blue Hinojosa, Katie Macyshyn, Sedna, and Sifu Sun.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Launched in March 2004, Transformer’s annual Exercises for Emerging Artists program supports DC-based emerging artists at new growth points or crossroads in their professional and creative development. Intended to both advance artists' careers and build peer support, the Exercises program consists of comprehensive bi-weekly peer critique and mentorship sessions spanning several months (April – July) to stimulate and encourage the participating artists as they create new work. Facilitated by Transformer staff, the participating artists receive mentorship and feedback from a series of guest mentor artists, curators, and other arts leaders.

E18: Performance Art was curated and led by mentor Hoesy Corona, an emerging and uncategorized queer Mexican artist living and working in the United States, with coordination by Katie Lee, Transformer’s Exhibitions & Programs Manager. The E18: Performance Art cohort also received additional guidance and feedback from a series of guest mentors, including Ashley Dehoyos, Veronica Peña, Ada Pinkston, and Keioui Keijaun Thomas.

Each artist presents a new, live performance created through their mentorship experience at Transformer and/or at nearby Logan Circle Park. The performances are open to all audiences free of charge. Audience members are encouraged to visit Transformer after each performance concludes, to view visual ephemera exhibited in Transformer’s storefront window, located at 1404 P St NW Washington, DC 20005, on display until the Wednesday following each performance.

ARTIST BIOS + PERFORMANCE DETAILS:

Sedna, MFK
SATURDAY, JULY 17 | 4PM, Transformer; 5PM, Logan Circle Park

In this performance, Sedna challenges their personal experience of society’s passive aggressive perceptions through their take on the game, “Mary, Fuck, Kill.” From school grounds to group chats to viral polls on twitter, Marry, Fuck, Kill, is a fairly straightforward game where the only question posed is simple; would you marry, fuck or kill, this person? Sedna takes this “lighthearted joke” a step further as metaphor for how violent, primal, and patriarchal our interactions are with each other on a daily basis. Specifically when we’re discussing black people, more specifically black women and gender expansive people.  

Through a ceremony of binding, marking and suspension, Sedna dares the crowd to mirror their vulnerability, while asking, “Will you marry me, fuck me, kill me, or just watch?” White, red, and gold acrylic become the marker and medium for a collective painting on a canvas of flesh, nylon, and twine. 

“This project is dedicated to all the Black girls and Black gender expansive people whose bodies, hair, voices, skin, attitude, queerness, and very identities were used against them. Those who had their autonomy stripped from them. Those who have operated in a racist patriarchal society that gave no priority to their protection.” 

Sedna is a multi (un)disciplinary artist dedicating their life’s work to merging music, performance, and visual with radical self-awareness and accountability. Their ability to transcend mediums allows them to flow into many different realms and environments. Sedna creates “self-portraits that are not me,” bringing life to the many versions of an individual. They began working with ropes as a means to tap deeper into their own autonomy and developing deeper patience. Their art has taken them to perform and exhibit in Los Angeles, DC, and New York. Sedna is the lead singer of alternative band, Purple Hurt. Their role within the band has led them to expand into creative direction, set and costume design. Incorporating their songwriting with visual art gives them the full transparency to invite others in while they reimagine their experience from a new perspective.
 

Sedna, performance “MFK”, July 17, 2021 | E18: Performance Art. Images by Dee Dwyer.

Katie Macyshyn, M(vs+ic)TV Beach House
SATURDAY, JULY 24 | 7PM, Transformer

This is the true story of one humanoid... faced with themselves... picked to live in a glass house... to heal together and have their lives changed...to find out what happens when people stop living an illusion, and start being real.

M(vs+ic)TV Beach House is an interdimensional interactive “TV special” by Katie Macyshyn (Magician). Transformer’s gallery window becomes a fish bowl featuring a technicolor beach scene from a galaxy not so far from here. Audience members are invited to engage with the performance by passing notes through a slot that will be used as content for the improvisational variety hour. This work is part of Macyshyn’s multimedia performance series M(vs+ic)TV, which follows an extraterrestrial star-child’s coming of age journey as they attempt to make contact with Earth and navigate the egoic waters of 20th century media transmissions obscuring the way.

Katie Macyshyn (she/they) is a performance artist and experiential art practitioner serving collaborative new media art. Her mixed media practice spans wearables, installation, sound, and video. They are also an art instructor and songstress who specializes in the therapeutic benefits of creative play in early childhood. Macyshyn holds a BFA from the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at George Washington University. She lives in Mount Rainier, MD and hails from Toms River, NJ.

Katie Macyshyn, "M(vs+ic)TV Beach House," July 24, 2021 | E18: Performance Art. Images by Farrah Skeiky.

Imogen-Blue Hinojosa, Canto I: Petrol Blues
SATURDAY, JULY 31 | 9PM, Transformer

Canto I: Petrol Blues departs from the lived experiences of trans sex workers. Serving as a testimony of grievance toward a cis society, the speaking subject’s experience is turned into evidence of a lived documentation of the political, then explored through the exhibitionary gesture of a Red Light District shop front. Raw life experience is re-presented and re-performed for the gaze of the audience, irrespective of the subject’s willingness to make this gaze the primary theme of the work. Canto I negotiates an interplay of vulnerability between subject and audience, dissolving the barriers of desire, trauma, and privacy, creating a catalyst for social change towards the preconceptions of sex work and the fetishization of the trans body. Canto I is Hinojosa’s second collaboration with renowned harpist Aisling Ennis, delivering a fresh take on a classic Spanish ballad.

Imogen-Blue Hinojosa (1992, USA) is a contemporary American artist known for her performance, video, and photography work. She lives and works between the US and the UK. Hinojosa’s practice places us in an alternate world where we slip between autobiography and fiction. Working across the still and moving image, her work explores intimacy, trauma, and “the stage” as a site for suspension of disbelief. Imogen-Blue holds a BFA in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the University of Goldsmiths London. Upcoming Exhibitions: Prologue:Invocation, The Kreeger Museum Washington D.C, USA 2021. Selected exhibitions include: Liturgia, A4 Sounds Gallery, Dublin, IE 2020, PELIGROSA, (Glitter Hole) Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, IE 2020, Pearl (You Amuse Me / I Frighten You) curated by Camille Brechignac, b.Dewitt Gallery, The Workshop London, London, UK 2019, Penny Dreadful, Seventeen Gallery, London, UK 2019.

Imogen-Blue Hinojosa, performance "Canto I: Petrol Blues, " July 31, 2021 | E18: Performance Art. Images by Mariah Miranda.

Alexander D'Agostino, Lavender Scary Fairy
SATURDAY, AUGUST 7 | 6PM, Transformer; 6:30PM, Logan Circle Park 

Lavender Scary Fairy is a new performance/exhibition by Alexander D’Agostino meditating  on the history of and resistance to the Lavender scare, a moral panic in the US, beginning in the 1950s that 40 years, where thousands of gay employees were fired or forced to resign from the  federal workforce under homophobic laws and policies. This sparked ongoing acts of resistance  to homophobic and discriminatory policies that positioned homosexuals and sexual-minorities as  threats to national security. Even today, we see fear based policy and legislative action that  echoes the same scare tactics and nationalist agendas of the Lavender Scare. This processional performance begins at Transformer Gallery and continues onto Logan Circle Park, where people can receive a lavender blessing from Lavender Scary Fairy.  

Performance relics will be on display at Transformer the following week of the performance. 

Alexander D'Agostino is a performance artist, teacher, and arts organizer based in Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009 with a BFA in painting. He investigates the queer and otherworldly through dance, ritual, teaching, installation and performance art. His work has been presented at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, the Center for Contemporary Art in Afghanistan in Kabul, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Chashama's summer performance series in Manhattan, Itinerant Performance Art Festival at the Queens Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and most recently at the Target Gallery in Washington DC.

Alexander D'Agostino, performance “Lavender Scary Fairy”, August 7, 2021 | E18: Performance Art. Images by Mariah Miranda.

Sifu Sun, Ghost in the Shell
SATURDAY, AUGUST 14 | 8PM, Logan Circle Park; 9PM, Transformer

Bear witness to the SPIRIT’s transition and acceptance of death. Fully exposed and allowing the tethers of the spirit world to be seen, the Spirit honors the embrace of their retained social and emotional ties. In this radical act, the tethers honor the powers that support and advise throughout our daily experience.

Sifu Sun (Maya Sun) is an experimental artist. Within her practices, intention is key. Honing in on spiritual and ancestral release, SIFU acts as a vessel to promote introspection in order to discover healing with a necessary painful grace. 

Sifu Sun, performance “Ghost in the Shell”, August 14, 2021 | E18: Performance Art. Images by Mariah Miranada.