homeLA in Venice - Tickets on sale 2/6!
Venice is a special event that brings in
homeLA’s 10th year of art’s programming!
Join us March 4th and 5th for Venice, a site-specific interdisciplinary performance event with artists Stephanie Dai, Young Joon Kwak & Kim Ye, Emily Marchand, Jobel Medina, and Flora Wiegmann & Maya Gurantz at the long-time canal-side home of Mark Mack and Faiza Alhassoun in Venice Beach.
Venice unfolds as a melange of lite salon-style moments of dance, performance art, music, sound, drama, activism, humor, and house party vibes with artist work that responds to this family home, its modernist architecture, and the history of Abbot Kinney’s “Venice of America.” As such, the dynamics of public and private space are played out as they relate to the domestic, hospitality, community, identity, the environment, and urban space. This is an indoor/outdoor event. Venice, originally scheduled for 2020, is made possible in part through the generous support from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts.
Venice by homeLA
Venice takes place in, around, and in respect to a home designed by renown Californian architect, Mark Mack. His architecture is quintessential California Modernism with an approach and functionality that considers the specifics of the site and its wider socio-cultural contexts. Characteristically, Mack constructed his family residence to be public facing with large windows, glass doors, and unobstructed by picketed fences or hedges. These design aesthetics are juxtaposed by neighboring fortified ground-up remodels that tend to abandon public canal walkways. This urban character sets the stage for the following works:
Choreographer and dancer Stephanie Dai employs Mack’s California modern architectural aesthetic and nearby canal to underscore and expand the liminal divide between the home’s indoor/outdoor design and public and private living. Utilizing the canal as a source for remembering and reimagining, Dai’s work reconciles our modern sensibilities with the desire to connect with nature.
Multidisciplinary artists and performers Young Joon Kwak and Kim Ye will present Matrilineal Ambivalences (in Venice), activating the domestic space as a site onto which hopes and anxieties around gender, class, and caretaking are unraveled. Matrilineal Ambivalences (in Venice) is a continuation of their collaborative series Rites of Matrilineal Dissent (2015 – ongoing) in which Kwak and Ye reprise their roles as “Baby Girl” and “Mommy” to enact their dissent of harmful notions of womanhood and femininity. For Matrilineal Ambivalences (in Venice), Kwak and Ye invite audiences to attend a very special rite of passage for Baby Girl (and Mommy!): the Baby Shower.
Choreographer and dancer Jobel Medina’s immersive performance will take audiences through sections of this two-story house with a sense of quiet exploration inducing curiosity, humor, and longing. Working in collaboration with sound engineer, Justin Scheid; architect of sound, DJ Orange; and costume designer/stylist, Elizabeth Warn, Medina creates a sensorial landscape culled from the sounds, movements, and limitations of the space to shift our experience with it, him, and ourselves. Medina’s performance will be projected onsite and streamed on Instagram, extending the public/private realm beyond the site.
Dance artists Maya Gurantz and Flora Wiegmann will present an itinerant work that offers grief as a form of deep environmental activism. Through the performance of small rituals, quotidian and surreal, they present us with actions and emotional survival drills aimed at honoring what we have, what we will miss and what is to come. Deep activism through grief is offered as a cathartic exercise to reconnect our kinship with the world.
Long-time homeLA collaborator and artist, Emily Marchand, will once again re-conceive guest hospitality: this time from a floating barge. From her imagination comes citrusy-herb cocktails in hand-made ceramic vessels, inspired in taste and design by Faiza’s garden and the flora and fauna of the Venice canals. Guests are invited to sip, linger, and take in the surrounding landscape. In the spirit of the generosity of homeLA’s past, present, and future hosts, Marchand transpositions the obligatory “host gift” with a keepsake gift for guests.
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Additional Details
homeLA events require proximity and are intimate events that include live video recording and photo for documentation and accessibility purposes.
COVID: In fostering a community of care, we ask that you keep the following guidelines in mind: Full proof of vaccination or negative test and masking indoors are required. If you are feeling sick at all, we ask that you please stay home.
Accessibility: homeLA is dedicated to ensure that our events are as accessible as possible for our disability community members and artists. Please fill out this form to let us know about your access needs. We will do our best to meet those needs. This event will be indoors/outdoors and includes loud sounds and music. A portion of the performance will take place in non-accessible places. A live-stream video projection will accompany this proportion of the programming. Images of the location along with their image descriptions are available upon request. Please let us know about your access needs by February 24th and reach out to us with any questions: info@homela.org.
This activity is supported in part by The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts and the California Arts Council, a state agency. Learn more at www.arts.ca.gov. homeLA is fiscally sponsored by Fulcrum Arts.
About Stephanie Dai
From Fremont, CA, Stephanie Dai is a 2019 inaugural graduate of the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance. Her versatility and distinct improvisation style has allowed her to perform as a soloist in the original works of Bill T. Jones, Sonya Tayeh, the JA Collective, and the TL Collective. She has also been featured in the video projects of Julia Stone, Solange, Porter Robinson, CL, and Ryan Murphy among many others. Stephanie currently freelances as an LA based performer and choreographer. With her work, she hopes to expand the storytelling potential of dance in multidisciplinary explorations of the extraordinary within the ordinary. @stephdaii
About Young Joon Kwak
Young Joon Kwak (they/she, b. 1984, Queens, NY) is a LA-based multidisciplinary artist whose work spans sculpture, performance, video, sound, and community-based collaborations. Kwak received an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014, MAPH from the University of Chicago in 2010, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Kwak is the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving beauty salon/platform for collaborative performances and installations with their community of queer/trans/POC artists and performers. Kwak is lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner.
Kwak presented solo and collaborative exhibitions internationally at galleries and institutions including Arko Art Center, Seoul (2022); Korean Cultural Center, LA (2021);Commonwealth & Council, LA (2021, 2017, 2016, 2014); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2018); and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre, Alberta (2018). Selected performances and group exhibitions have been held at Hauser & Wirth, New York (2021), Antenna Space, Shanghai (2019); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts,San Francisco (2019); 47 Canal, New York (2018); Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City (2018); Art Museum of the National University of Colombia, Bogotá (2018); Hammer Museum, LA (2016); The Broad, LA (2016); and Le Pavillon Vendôme Centre d’Art Contemporain, Clichy, France (2016).@youngjoonkwak
About Maya Gurantz
Maya Gurantz is an LA-based video/dance artist whose work interrogates how constructions of gender, race, class, and progress operate in our shared American myths, public rituals, and private desires. She's shown videos, performances, installations, and social practice projects at the MCA Denver, Pitzer Art Gallery, Grand Central Art Center, Catharine Clark Gallery, MoCA Utah, Oakland Museum of California, Beaconsfield Gallery Vauxhall, Navel LA, Art Center College of Design, Goat Farm Atlanta, Great Wall of Oakland, High Desert Test Sites, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among others. She was a recipient of the inaugural Pieter Performance Grant for Dancemakers, the inaugural Prospect Art Present Work initiative, and was an Artist in Residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation. As a writer, Maya regularly contributes to The LA Review of Books (where her essay, Kompromat, was the most-read article of 2019), and has written for This American Life, East of Borneo, The Frame at KPCC, The Awl, Notes on Looking, Acid-Free, Baumtest Quarterly, and RECAPS Magazine. @mayagurantz
About Emily Marchand
Inspired by the native and manufactured landscapes of Los Angeles, Emily Marchand makes textiles and ceramics embedded with vegetables, fruits, eggs,plants, flowers, birds, and animals. What began as an investigation and exploration into Big Agriculture, seed banks and food scarcity, has generated a closer look into her own relationship to food, cooking, gardening, community, feeding friends and unhoused neighbors. Adjacent to her art practice, she cooks for a living as a food stylist, and as a volunteer for local non-profit organizations feeding the unhoused community including Brown Bag Lady, Downtown Women’s Center, and MEND Poverty. Marchand received her BA from UCLA and her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Selected projects include Solarium at The Pit (Glendale, CA), Current: LA Food Public Art Triennial (Los Angeles, CA), homeLA (Los Angeles, CA), Genius Loci at Setareh Gallery (Düsseldorf, DE), soft ammunition at NowSpace (Los Angeles, CA),and Artists + Institutions at MAK Center (Los Angeles, CA). @emily_marchand
About Jobel Medina
Jobel Medina (b. 1990 Pasig, Philippines) is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist with a natural inclination for contradictions, often merging spectacle with experimental. He is known for his solo series, Kill The Monsters, recently exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art (2022) and his queer romance theatrical-dance, David, My Goliath, premiered at Redcat (2021). He has toured nationally and internationally as a dancer for Ate9 Dance Company (2017-2022) and YC Studio (2017-2018) and has worked with artists such as Tino Sehgal at The Hammer Museum; Simon McBurney with The LA Philharmonic at The Walt Disney Concert Hall; Christopher Bordenave at The San Francisco Symphony Hall, Shahar Binyamini, Tom Weinberger. Additionally, he has appeared in commercials including Calvin Klein,Lexus, OnStar, Adidas, as well as in multiple music videos including Anderson Pak, Noah Cyrus, Perfume Genius. Jobel received his Masters in Fine Arts at the California Institute of The Arts and has taught movement workshops at CSULB, CSULA, CSUF, CalArts. @jobelmed
About Flora Wiegmann
Flora Wiegmann works in live performance, dance, and film, and has exhibited at a wide array of venues across the U.S. and internationally. Site-specificity and research-based projects have led her to uncover new systems for dance-making and a wider curiosity for bodily experience as the work itself. She is co-founder of the Laboratory for Embodied Intelligences with artist Nina Waisman, creating work that embodies scientific data and allows participants to try on non-human perspectives in order to upend human-centric viewpoints and gain reverence, and therefore, empathy, for other creatures. During the pandemic, she relocated to an Island in the State of Washington where she volunteers with Pacific Mammal Research. She is also an active member of Transition Lopez Island (part of the worldwide Transition Movement), with a focus on strengthening local food economies. @florawiegmann
About Kim Ye
Kim Ye (all pronouns, b. 1984, Beijing, China) is a Chinese American interdisciplinary artist whose research-based practice encompasses performance, sculpture, video, installation, text, and community organizing. She received her MFA from UCLA (2012), BA from Pomona College (2007), and has worked as a professional dominatrix in Los Angeles since 2011. Their work engages gendered constructions around power,taboo, and privacy by activating the artist/viewer dynamic to create situations of intimacy and exchange. Treating the body and its immediate surroundings as sites of resistance and aspiration, his praxis draws from frameworks emerging from queer, sex worker, and first-generation communities. Ye has exhibited, screened, and performed widely nationally and internationally at institutions such as The Getty, Wattis Institute, Hammer Museum, Banff Center for Arts, Material Art Fair, and Frieze Film Seoul among others. She is currently on the board of Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOPLA) and teaches in the Photo & Media department at California Institute of the Arts. @kimyekimyekimye
