In Their Own Image, 2024

March 23, 2024

Recap Video

In Their Own Image

March 23, 2024
1-4:00p with reception until 5:30p
MAK Center for Art and Architecture
835 Kings Rd, West Hollywood, CA 90069

In partnership with the MAK Center, homeLA presents In Their Own Image, a performance program in dialogue with a selection of photographic works from Austrian-born and self-proclaimed feminist artist VALIE EXPORT called Body Configurations, on view as part of “VALIE EXPORT: Embodied” at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House. 

In Their Own Image was a performance program curated by Chloë Flores featuring new work by performing artists Zackary Drucker, Sierra Fujita, Emily Lucid, Lara Salmon, Andrea Soto, and Dorian Wood. The program developed from an invitation to create work in response to VALIE EXPORT's series of physicalized performative actions and early feminist provocations known as Body Configurations.  The artists were asked to consider this body of work within the specific context of the Schindler House in Los Angeles, CA, where select works from this series will be exhibited.  Each artist engaged the proposition with work that responds to –– and subverts –– the spatial contexts of the Schindler House, just as EXPORT’s interventions in public space reframed the spatialized female body.

The work of EXPORT and other early feminist artists  fostered a more inclusive, intersectional, and supportive  movement for these artists and others whose creative  practices bring visibility to the complexities of  contemporary femme experience. Their various creative  expressions highlight the persistent challenges of gender  and social disparity in contemporary culture, and open  more nuanced understandings of femme and human  experience in the world. As such, the newly commissioned  performative creations invite awareness of structural  ableism, labor disparities, gender privileges, identity, and  unequal representation. Through works that pay tribute  to VALIE EXPORT's dismantling practices, In Their Own Image unravels the constructs that comprise traditional  subjectivities to open space and possibility for beings and  forms that are here, and those that are still yet to come.

Press

Hyperallergic
Untapped Journal
The Brooklyn Rail
ArtForum

Performances

Zackary Drucker’s Door Girl pays homage to Drucker’s formative years studying art and developing  a performance practice at CALARTS,  while greeting and admitting partygoers at Downtown LA's queer club Shits & Giggles in the aughts. Inspired by her teacher Michael  Asher, master of subtle interventions in museums and forebear of 'institutional critique,' Drucker is the door girl greeting  visitors as they enter the MAK Center.  In a time when social mores have been dissolved by the ubiquity of people's primary relationship with their phones, having face-to-face interactions is more radical and  necessary than ever. As a multimedia artist and filmmaker, Drucker’s work amplifies the voices of women and gender expansive people, and celebrates the richness and  complexity of transgender identity, history, and community building.

HANNYA - the Japanese word meaning for wisdom 般若 and the masks in Noh theater representing a jealous female demon – was a movement performance that works to reconstruct traditional stereotypes of deeply rooted Japanese culture and bring power, honor, and beauty to Sierra Fujita’s intersectional identity as a queer mixed-race dance artist with Japanese and Austrian roots. Drawing inspiration from the Schindler House design and EXPORT’s impulse to “break out from society’s binary code,” Fujita destabilizes the material and movement-based signifiers of Japanese culture, layering them on top of one another to challenge society’s perceptions of gender and identity to question where one’s selfhood is located, while simultaneously celebrating cultural heritage. Kimono by Kathy Fujita Puett. 

Lara Salmon is a performance artist whose work addresses living in chronic pain, an internal experience which she gives visibility to through her work.  sURGE is a durational performance where audiences are invited to regulate the level of electricity entering her body through a tens unit, commonly used to manage chronic pain. For sURGE, Salmon’s body acts as a sculptural signifer to her presence and pain, highlights architectural and structural elements, and pays homage to EXPORT’s Body Configurations and Tap and Touch Cinema.

As a movement-based artist, Andrea Soto resources her body to aim for the dissolution of architectural and sociohistorical traces shaped by practices of power and gender.  Inspired by EXPORT’s desire to escape social codification, Multitude (1-2) is Soto's corporeal exploration to destabilize her own identity through an inscription in the landscape, to be experienced by the audience in two parts: in front of the house and in the guest garden.

Performing artist Emily Lucid collaborates with artist Kyle Patrick Roberts to bring the guest garden to life with an audience in the round for Minotaur: an hour-long tragedy that portrays a contemporary experience  of transness.  What transpires will be a star crossed love story between feminine liberation and the desire for an architecture of empathy and deeper understanding for trans human rights. 

Out of a practice and desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people, multi-disciplinary artist Dorian Wood will bring visibility to invisible labor with Carry us, nourish them (prayer). For this itinerant performance work, she will move through Schindler House using their body and breath to honor the contracted laborers responsible for the initial construction and subsequent restorations of the building.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

“VALIE EXPORT: Embodied” was organized by MAK Center Director Jia Yi Gu with Seymour Polatin, Exhibitions and Programs Manager, Brian Taylor, Curatorial Assistant, and Maeve Atkinson, Education and Engagement Coordinator. 

In Their Own Image was presented by the MAK Center in partnership with homeLA.

The exhibition and program were made possible with support from Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Betsy Greenberg, the Austrian Consulate General Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Arts and Culture Department, and MAK Center’s Centennial Council.

BIOS

MAK Center for Art and Architecture
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is a contemporary, experimental, multi-disciplinary center for art and architecture headquartered in three significant architectural works by the Austrian-American architect R.M. Schindler. Offering a year-round schedule of exhibitions and events, the MAK Center presents programming that challenges conventional notions of architectural space and relationships between the creative arts.

VALIE EXPORT is a pioneer in film, video and installation art who has produced one of the most significant bodies of feminist art in the post-war period. Her groundbreaking films and performances in the 1960s and 1970s introduced a new form of radical, embodied feminism to Europe, examining the politics of the body in relation to its environment, culture and society. The multidisciplinary nature of EXPORT's 'Expanded Cinema' practice and use of her own body as an artistic medium positions her as one of the earliest performance artists alongside Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow.

VALIE EXPORT lives and works in Vienna, where she co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative. Since 1968, she has taken part in numerous international exhibitions, including documenta 6 and 12 (1977 and 2007) and the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980. In recent years, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2020); Neue Berliner Kunstverein (2018); Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz (2017); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2011); Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2010); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2009); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007) have devoted major solo exhibitions to her work. EXPORT has taught at a number of international institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, San Francisco Art Institute and University of the Arts in Berlin. From 1995–2005 she was professor of multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. In 2019, she was awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the visual arts. VALIE EXPORT received the Max-Beckmann-Prize of the City of Frankfurt 2022. 

Zackary Drucker is an American multimedia artist, director, and producer who has dedicated her work to telling stories that expand our cultural understanding of difference. Her credits include directing the Hulu Original documentary Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl; and co-directing the Sundance award-winning HBO original documentary film The Stroll and the HBO documentary series The Lady and the Dale. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others.

Chloë Flores is a Latinx Yaqui Native curator and arts writer, editor, advisor, and producer whose work centers on body-based, performative, and site-specific practices and the production of culture in public space.  She is the Executive and Artistic Director of homeLA, a LA-based performance organization and platform for experimental and site-specific dance, performance, and art. Flores founded and directed GuestHaus Residency (2011-2023), was Programs Director at Heidi Duckler Dance (2021-22), and co-founded the Los Angeles Dance Worker Coalition (LADWC) that developed/launched the first dance-specific grant program for the Los Angeles’ DCA Performing Arts Division (2022).  Flores has worked in the arts in Los Angeles since 1999, co-founded/co-directed enView Gallery in Long Beach from 2005-2008, and received her MA in Curatorial Practices in 2011 from USC.  Over the years, she has worked on exhibitions, programs and texts for the following organizations: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Office, The Armory Center for the Arts, Dance Resource Center, Monte Vista Projects, Cypress College, The Sweeney Art Gallery at UC Riverside, Anthony Greaney, Sierra Nevada College, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House and at the Mackey Garage Top, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and The Box.

Sierra Fujita (b. at home in San Diego, 1995) is a queer, Japanese multi-hyphenate artist: actor, dancer, model, choreographer and director in LA. She was a competitive gymnast in her early years which influences her athletic contemporary movement as a strong foundation. Some of her credits include Cirque du Soleil, national tours with Simone Biles and Jamie xx, Netflix, A24, Noah Cyrus, Shygirl, Banks, LA Times, LA Opera and multiple full length dance shows and short films she’s created and curated. Sierra thrives on pushing personal and project boundaries, and her canvas extends beyond conventional grounds. She doesn’t like to limit herself to any norms or boxes and always likes to keep her intuition and ambition flowing. 

Emily Lucid is a Jewish trans female thinker and maker living with schizoaffective disorder. Lucid focuses primarily on the question of ‘performance’. A graduate of California Institute of The Arts: Lucid is an experimental writer, performance artist, visual artist, sound artist, curator and actor. Lucid’s work deals with her interest in transgender rights, psychology, technology and beauty. She has read, performed, curated and exhibited at galleries, theaters, web portals and festivals across Los Angeles and beyond.

Lara Salmon is a performance artist whose work addresses the experience of chronic pain. Having lived in pain for most of her life, Lara is hyper-vigilant to physicality. The fight to retain mobility finds expression in the extremity and duration of her art. Lara lives in Los Angeles, California. She has had nine solo and over thirty group exhibitions in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. Lara was awarded the Grand Prix of the 2021 Larnaca Biennale in Cyprus. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as The Invisible Archive, Alpha News, and the Los Angeles Daily News.

Andrea Soto (she/ella), is a first-generation Mexican American movement artist and collaborator. Her craft lives in performance and data-gathering, holding the body as the temple of pleasure and truth system. Andrea builds poetic ecosystems rooted in the dismantling of hierarchical-systems across mediums. Her recent work has been shared at Human Resources and Highways Performance Space, and she last performed at Untitled Art Fair Miami. Andrea lives in Los Angeles, and holds a BFA in Dance from California Institute of the Arts. She was awarded the Barbara Ensley Award on behalf of the Merce Cunningham Trust in 2024. 

Dorian Wood (she/they) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose intent of “infecting” spaces and ideologies is born from a desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people. Her work has been presented at institutions around the world, including The Broad (Los Angeles), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Museo Nacional Del Prado (Madrid) and Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris (Mexico City). Wood is a recipient of a 2023 LA County Performing Arts Recovery Grant, a 2023 City of Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Project Grant, a 2023 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, a 2020 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Art Matters Foundation Grant. In 2023, Wood premiered Canto de Todes, a mutating 12-hour composition/installation.