Sabina Lee Gallery http://sabinaleegallery.tumblr.com | www.sabinaleegallery.com
971 Chung King Road, Los Angeles CA, 90012
Past Present | Future Imperatives: Queer Space Time
Việt Lê, Genevieve Erin O’Brien, Jai Arun Ravine, Tina Takemoto
Opening (Screening, Food, Installations & Performances) Saturday, February 25, 2012, 6-9pm
6pm start | 7pm short screenings | 8pm One Night Band
Exhibition February 25-March 24, 2012 | open Wednesday – Saturday 11am-6pm
imperative grammatical mood:

• give an order
• express a desire
• make a request
• offer advice
• recommend something

What is queer time? What is colored people’s time? And queer people of color time?
Crossing, cruising time zones and erogenous zones, this show explores transnational queer bodies through space and time. Queer time challenges standard notions of linear progress and biological time. There is no single, straight-forward model of development (pun intended) but rather a multiplicity of movements and moments. Queer temporalities collapse the binaries of time, sexuality, and progress. The past, present and future is blurred. Gendered divides are re-imagined. First and third worlds meld.
The Global South is stereotyped as “backwards” while the ―”advanced” Global North is the forward-moving engine of development. Political economist Timothy Mitchell observes that “the experience of modernity is . . . a relationship between time and space.” Shifting city skylines trace timelines of progress. The exploitation of gendered, raced labor is built upon this uneven terrain. Labor is the site of multiple oppressions.
At work and play, queer time reconfigures institutional and intimate relationships. In a Queer Time and Place, gender theorist Jack Halberstam argues that “Queer uses of time and space develop in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.”  The past, present, and future meet through queer bodies of color and their imagined communities. “Queer subcultures develop as alternatives to kinship-based notions of community,”  Halberstam notes. Enmeshed within trans-local communities, these four artists explore time, space, race, and translation. Through queer postcolonial time, they reexamine still-present pasts and offer possibilities for dystopic/ utopic futures.

GEO Home Los Angeles pop-up

Monday November 22^nd 2010

Seating @ 7:30pm (PST)

Good Girl Dinette

110 North Avenue 56

Los Angeles, CA 90042

To RSVP, email Erin at erin@erin-obrien.com. Please include your name, how many people are in your party, and your phone number. Once you RSVP, you will be emailed a confirmation and given directions for payment via PayPal. We apologize but due to space constraints we cannot accept reservations for parties of more than 4 people.

Tickets are $45 per person.

Please join us for this unique art event where the food and the guests are the art.

This is a one-time only event, so make your reservations soon! We are grateful to our gastronomic sister and chef Diep Tran who is generously hosting us in her space at Good Girl Dinette. www.goodgirlfoods.com

The 4-course menu (with refreshments) will be a surprise, but to give you a hint, the theme is Saigon meets Los Angeles.

10% of all proceeds for the event will be donated to KOTO – Know One Teach One Saigon – http://www.koto.com.au/. KOTO is a not-for-profit restaurant and service-based vocational training program that is changing the lives of street youth and disadvantaged youth in Vietnam.

See you there,

Genevieve Erin O’Brien

www.erin-obrien.com

Notice of documentation: GEO Home is an artistic endeavor and a performance. By attending the GEO Home LA Pop-up, you agree to be documented (digital still, video and web broadcast) during the event. If you are not comfortable being documented we cannot accommodate you for this dinner.

In this synaesthetic performance series, I will cook a meal that reminds me of “home,” which will be prepared at the host’s house. Through this performance series I explore notions of home, memory, synaesthesia, community, and authenticity. Sometimes, it is about food that reminds me of a place I called home, or a memory or feeling of a place. Sometimes, it is just about a moment. Sometimes, it is about a confluence of temporal and spatial realms in a particular space. It is always about food. As a bit of a nomad, food has always been anchor to a place that for me has never really existed – a place called home. I will create a performance of home by preparing and sharing a meal with you. You never know what will be on the menu. Together, we will enjoy a meal, just like family – just like “home.”

Fulbright Fellowship Research Project:

In Vietnamese, the word “nu’ó’c” means, water, country, nation, and homeland.  To ask “nu’ó’c nào?” is to ask where is your water? Where is your country?  Where is your home?  This project investigates the relationship between Vietnamese communities and water.  By exploring the subtleties of the word nu’ó’c in traditional arts, myths and legends, I plan to create a series of videos, installations and performances that explore notions water and home in the Vietnamese Diaspora. I intend to do this by learning traditional crafts and techniques such as water puppetry and boat weaving and by researching the origins and traditional method of making nu’ó’c ma’m (fish sauce), a staple in Vietnamese cuisine. I will study the impact of colonialism, militarism and tourism on these traditional crafts.

In Live by Water Die By Water, author Huynh Sanh Thong discusses the origins of the word “Nu’ó’c,” which has come to be one of the most pervasive denotations and connotations in the Vietnamese lexicon.  She ruminates over the subtleties of the multifarious meanings.  In the broadest sense, nu’ó’c is a step one takes in order to reach a goal.  As a mixed race Vietnamese/American artist, I am constantly investigating my own relationship to Vietnam and I am forced to play the role of a cultural intermediary, treading water between both worlds.  In this respect, I am interested in diving into nu’ó’c and experiencing Vietnam as an artist who is both American and Vietnamese, a product of the historical connection between these two countries.

The boat remains an important figure in the Vietnamese refugee narrative.  The water represents a liminal space where identity is not fixed but instead becomes transnational – a space where race, gender, and sexuality is explored and transformed.

This project will be a new body of work including installation, video and durational performances created through documentation of my experiences.  For me, durational performance embodies sentiment.  The body takes responsibility for history, memories and feelings about a place and translates this into conceptual movement and figures the body in time, space and history.  I will also incorporate traditional storytelling methods, such as water puppetry, to investigate the transnational experience of the Vietnamese community.  

At the Free Speech Corner adjacent to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, on Veteran’s Day 2007 Erin shaved her head as a response to the war in Iraq and other forms of oppression. In an effort to extend this gesture to the public, Erin offers to shave off the hair of those willing to make a commitment to peace.  The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago invited the artist to present the Peace Salon as part of the on-going 12×12 series on Independence Day 2008.

The Peace Salon also serves as a space for critical analysis, thought and
dialogue.  This space is telegraphed beyond the moment of having one’s head shaved and into the everyday interaction with the public.

This bold statement is a reminder that everyday when we look in the mirror that we cannot afford to be complacent, that we are part of a larger system. The personal transformation that participants will experience is a testament to our pledge for peace that we embrace in all aspects of our life – to release ourselves from attachment.  It is this very attachment that drives this war, attachment to convenience, to our oil-dependent cars, to our lattes, and to our daily life.

The visual signifier is also meant to be a reminder to the American public that we are a country engaged in war, as well as a physical marker to extend our solidarity with the soldiers serving in Iraq and our determination to bring them home.

A SYMPHONY FOR THE SENSES EATING ART FOR PEACE

Chicago, Illinois – In a gesture some are calling “Yum-Yum Diplomacy,” a Chicago based performance installation artist Genevieve Erin O’Brien has built a replica of The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) nuclear reactor site at Yongbyon entirely out of gingerbread.  

The event is co-sponsored in part by the Nuclear Peace Age Foundation.  NPAF president David Krieger announced  “Through her art, Erin seeks to awaken people everywhere to their responsibility to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”

“A nuclear reactor made out of gingerbread – now this is a first for nonproliferation,” noted Patrick O’Brien the artist’s father and also a representative of the Nonproliferation and Disarmament Fund.  Patrick O’Brien is currently in Pyongyang, DPRK overseeing the international effort to disable DPRK’s nuclear arsenal.   Patrick O’Brien commented,  “It seems we have a little family legacy evolving here.”

“I want to offer a way for people engage in the nuclear peace movement that is tangible, edible and fun. The installation, titled ’Nuclear Family,’ is a natural blend of my mother’s occupation as a pastry chef and my father’s work and my own performance and installation art.  You could call it edible aesthetics,” says the artist Erin O’Brien.

Download: nuclear_family_press_release.pdf (712 KB)

A Vietnamese suitcase is a generally speaking a cardboard box. The “suitcase” serves a particularly temporary purpose, unlike the somewhat indestructible western version of the suitcase, made for on-going travel.  I position myself at specific locations around specific cities and ask  people to write their sentiments about Vietnam.   The thoughts, feelings and memories are written on Joss paper and put in the “suitcase”.  

A Vietnamese suitcase is a generally speaking a cardboard box. The “suitcase” serves a particularly temporary purpose, unlike the somewhat indestructible western version of the suitcase, made for on-going travel. I position myself at locations around various cities; the sites in each city include the federal building, the Vietnamese neighborhood and a Vietnam Memorial.

I travel between these sites by public transit over the course of one day. People are asked to share their thoughts, feelings, and memories of Vietnam. I chose not to talk, instead using a flyer and gestures to communicate. The thoughts, feelings and memories are written on Joss paper and put in the “suitcase”.  I carry these sentiments with me throughout the city.  At each Vietnam Memorial, I perform a mourning ritual burning incense to honor the Vietnamese who were killed in the war.

The durational performance was performed in three cities – Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC. Installations are created with the Joss paper and the documentation of the durational performance. After visiting all three cities, I will return the Joss Paper to Vietnam. In Vietnam, I will create the final performances.  Using the text from the Joss Paper and a translator I will read the sentiments in English and Vietnamese then I will burn the Joss papers on the festival of Vu Lan – know as Wandering Souls Day in Vietnam.  I will then repatriate the ashes of the joss paper to Hanoi and scatter them on a lunar holiday.  The performances follows the migrations and force immigration of Vietnamese Diaspora in the reverse.

“The Monk Who Licked Me,” is a modern day odyssey into the heart, mind, and body of a young woman on a spiritual quest.  

Armed with vibrators, palmistry books, and the wisdom of Buddhis Master Thich Nhat Hanh, Erin leaves Los Angeles for Vietnam, her motherland.  Expecting to find answers in the ancient Buddhist temples and picturesque landscapes of Vietnam and Cambodia, Erin finds much more than she was bargaining for — the temples are neither so ancient or sacred, being touched by the long arm of Hollywood film an altogether too human monks, tour guides, and roaming punks.  While imagining the carving of the stones that make up the temples of Angkor Wat, Erin reflects on life, the work that must be put into love relationships, and the insidious nature of verbal abuse.  Her experiences also bring her face to face with the aftermath of war in Vietnam and force her to think about the effects of the current war in Iraq — the similarities, as presented in a multimedia slide show, are stark.

The story is a clever and poignant exploration of transnational identity and the effects of U.S. militarism from the U.S. war in Vietnam to the SARS scare to the current day U.S. war in Iraq.  Through a compelling and often hilarious narrative, Erin covers issues such as love, sexual violence against women, and globalization by interweaving her personal experiences and reactions with the realities of the aftermath of war and U.S. cultural imperialism.

For booking please email me at erin@erin-obrien.com