OPEN STUDIOS
Happy Birthday and Merry Christmas and Every Other Fun Holiday!
Dearest Friends,
I’m back in NYC, taking a pause and getting fucked by logistics. My time in Nuremberg was quite joyful and restful. Everyone keeps asking, Why Germany (especially now)? Honestly, it’s all in the astrocartography, and now my personal experience backs it up—Germany feels like my place of luck and good fortune. It’s left its mark, and I feel motivated about what’s next. My return is partially due to visa complications, but I’m hoping to sort it all out soon and finish up my time there. In the meantime, I’m here until the New Year — reach out to hold hands, collab, do photoshoots, grab a coffee, drink wine, and read next to each other.
But that's not what this email is about! Tomorrow, Thursday at 7:30pm, join me at the Center for Performance Research in NYC for OPEN STUDIOS, featuring work by Avatar Lilith, Coco Villa, and Candi X, all curated by yours truly!
When CPR asked me to curate a slot, my first thought was… who do I crush on, who do I want to collaborate with, who do I wish I could see perform all the time? Voilà! My dream lineup. This show feels like Christmas and my Birthday all rolled into one—and if you come, it’ll feel like yours too!
Candi X is flying in from Mexico City just for this, bringing us R.I.P. ROSY, a beautiful erotic meditation on grief. Coco Villa will be performing with Benin Gardner in I Am Swimming With Zaza, weaving sculptural gestures and slow, rhythmic shapes—teased to me / us so well online (had me screaming with excitement) but impossible to capture until seen in person. And Avatar Lilith has created a new instrument trained on her digital DNA… it’s giving meat body.
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process. Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets.
sending a thousand kisses,
cy x
★・・・・・・★
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Avatar Lilith is a multi-hyphenate artist that masquerades as an avatar using computer graphics, sound design, installations, and audiovisual performance. They seek to reject linearity and binary logic systems by existing in two or more places at once. Avatar Lilith hopes to encourage others to embrace playfulness, curiosity, and creativity by worldbuilding and embracing alternative logic systems and technologies as a critical practice through performance, installations, and research. Their work has been featured internationally in galleries and venues such as Acud Galerie (Berlin), Nunu Gallery (NYC), Basement (CPH), Stonewall Inn (NYC), and Ars Electronica (AUT).
Candi X is a performance and video artist, experience facilitator, producer, and director originally from the US currently based in Mexico City. Her work reflects deep research around the eco-erotic relationship between the human and natural world and expresses through brightly queer and colorful outputs. All of her works are equal parts accessible, embodied, intellectual, and silly – redefining the erotic by focusing on igniting the sensorial imagination. Through playful, body based experiences, performances, films, and practices she facilitates fun, connection, and curiosity that opens audiences up to new perspectives.
Coco Villa is a Jamaican-Colombian-American dancer, interdisciplinary artist and educator from Queens, currently living in Brooklyn. Tightly bound to identity, Villa leads an interdisciplinary art-research practice investigating relations between body, object, and landscape. Their work spans across disciplines of performance, fashion design, installation, photography, and film. They utilize material and movement languages to tell autobiographical stories, explore human intimacy, and build familial archives. Driven by historical and scientific discovery, Villa thrives in the ocean, in the woods, in the dance studio, darkroom, design lab, and library, playfully creating by hand.
cy x is a demon and a dreamer moved by tremendous desire and obsession with glory holes, sex cinemas, erotic horror, queer archives, and money. They study the way that erotics and space co-construct each other and the objects produced from such encounters and utilize their findings to create ritualized ephemera in the form of writing, sound, video, and performance. Their work has been shown in the Center for Art Research and Alliances, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Culture Hub, Pioneer Works, Rewire Festival, and other spaces, both digital and physical.