“As I examine the community of artists and writers with whom I am in dialogue, many of them work in a discourse of perforation, annotation, lacunae, and the presence of absence. In a recent blog, Dodie Bellamy commented on the relation between queerness, theorization and fragments: “Queer celebrates poverty of theory. Make own stories out of gaps and silence.”  How indeed is the queer subject, the subject of the other, to be made present? What are the axiomatics of delivery?  Are there other kinds of presence that are structured by forms of absence?”  —Matias Viegener

The program is supported through a Cultural Resource Development Grant from the City of West Hollywood.

Q.E.D. references a novel by Gertrude Stein; Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum, or Things as They Are) was one of the earliest coming stories, written in 1903 though not published until 1950, after Stein’s death.

Participants

Matias Viegener is a writer, artist and critic who teaches at CalArts. He is one of the founders of the art collective Fallen Fruit, which has exhibited internationally in Mexico, Colombia, Denmark, Austria, and at LACMA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and ARCO 2010 in Madrid. He has published fiction and criticism in Afterimage, American Book Review, Artforum, Art Issues, ArtUS, Artweek, Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Critical Quarterly, Fiction International, Framework, The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Mirage, Paragraph, Suspect Thoughts, and X-tra. He is the co-editor of Séance in Experimental Writing and The Noulipian Analects. His new book of experimental non-fiction, 2500 Random Things About Me Too has been hailed as the first book written on and through Facebook.

Using, moving images, paintings and artifacts, writing and performance, Tisa Bryant asks questions about looking, race, sex, and myth-making. She is the author of Unexplained Presence, a collection of hybrid essays that remix perceptions of black presences in Eurocentric film, literature and visual arts. Her essays have recently appeared in the exhibition catalogs for visual artists Laylah Ali, Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji and Cauleen Smith. A novel, The Curator, about Black women and the cinematic, is forthcoming. She is faculty in the MFA Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts, and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Catherine Lord is a writer, artist, and curator whose work addresses issues of feminism, cultural politics, and colonialism. She is the author of the text/image experimental narrative, The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation (University of Texas Press), the conceptual translation Sa Calvitie, Son Colibri: Miss Translation (L’une Bevue) and (in collaboration with Richard Meyer), Art and Queer Culture, 1885-2005 (Phaidon Press, 2011). Her critical essays and her fiction have been published in several journals and anthologies, including: Afterimage, Art & Text, Framework, Documents, Art Journal, GLQ, X-tra, Artforum and October. Her curated exhibitions include “Pervert,” “Trash,” “Gender, fucked,” and “Memories of Overdevelopment: Philippine Diaspora in Contemporary Visual Art.” Her work as a visual artist was included in the 1995 inaugural biennial of Site Santa Fe, and has been shown at the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Post Gallery (Los Angeles), La Mama (NYC), DNJ and Thomas Jancar (Los Angeles), Manifesta (Murcia, Spain), and the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, among other venues. She is a Professor of Art at UC Irvine.

Anna Joy Springer is the author of The Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Fabulist Memoir and The Birdwisher(Birds of Lace). Formerly a singer in the Bay Area bands, Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow, Anna Joy has toured the United States and Europe being a wild feminist punk performer, and also toured with the all-women spoken word extravaganza, Sister Spit. She is Associate Professor of Literature at University of California at San Diego, where she truly loves teaching courses in Experimental Writing, Graphic Texts, and Postmodern Feminist Literatures.