QED II: Not (Quite) Easily Done

Wednesday
May 15, 2013
7:00 p.m.

MAK Center for Art & Architecture at the Schindler House
835 N. Kings Road
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Featuring
Jennifer Calkins
Anne de Marcken
Amanda Ackerman

Moderated by Teresa Carmody

$7 General; Free for Friends of the MAK Center and Members of Les Figues Press; become a member.

Q.E.D. II is a series of performances curated around issues of affinity, influence, and provocation. This program includes three events over the course of three months (March 13, April 8, and May 15); each evening features a Les Figues author alongside two additional writers and/or artists, whose work as impacted the author’s. Q.E.D. II builds on our 2012 Q.E.D. series on queer art and literature, including the questions Q.E.D. raised about bodies, sexuality, and identity. This year, Les Figues Press invites authors to act as both participant and curators—emphasizing communities of influence over issues of queerness—underscoring that both are bonds of affinity.

This event is co-curated by Jennifer Calkins; she begins her curatorial statement with two quotes:

“Therefore the products of 12 by 2, and of 6 by 4, are equal.” W. BEDWELL, 1614 De Numeris Geometricis, ii. 25

“But life is not like that. There are no QEDs.”
Church Times, 2006 17 Nov. 19/1

She continues:

Uncomfortable as it makes me, I have to agree with Church Times. I do not believe in Q.E.D. Nothing is demonstrated, nothing is quite easily done. The existence of two opposites at the same moment is just that. Or, it is only the mask of our perceptions, our cognition and our emotional reactivity, that hangs between us and the world like Los Angeles haze. I see in my work and the work of those I admire a constant return to the idea of that veil—glass darkly. Our intersections with the past, with the plants, with the nonhuman animals, are not about anything but our own speech. We are trying to reach outside of the echo chamber of our own minds towards something else, a sort of neat Q.E.D.—our own proof of the existence of ourselves and the other—that, even with the very tips of our fingers, the edge of our hair, we will never even brush.

The program is hosted by Les Figues Press and 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

Jennifer Calkins, Ph. D., M.F. A. is a writer, evolutionary biologist, and all around interdisciplinarian. She is the author of A Story of Witchery (Les Figues Press, 2006) and Devil Card (Beard of Bees Press, 2004). Jennifer’s recent work can be found in Dirty (Jaded Ibis Press, 2013), The Red Book (Fairy Tale Press, 2010), and the academic journals Configurations, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Condor and Journal of Molecular Evolution. You may also find her work at jdcalkins2001.wordpress.com and via her ongoing project The Quail Diaries (thequaildiaries.com). Jennifer lives in Seattle with a variety of creatures, teaches at The Evergreen State College, and studies quail in Sonora, Mexico (featured in the New York Times, Scientist at Work) and in California as well as in molecular labs in both Seattle and Olympia, WA.

Anne de Marcken is a writer and media artist. Her credits include short stories, poetry, screenplays, short and feature-length films and videos, and interactive web environments. Presently, de Marcken teaches at The Evergreen State College, is a guest member of the faculty in Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program, and maintains her position as Creative Director of the digital media arts studio Wovie. Her writing has been featured in Best New American Voices, Glimmer Train, Southern Indiana Review, Hunger Mountain, on NPR’s Selected Shorts, and elsewhere. She has received the Howard Frank Mosher Prize for Short Fiction, the Mary C. Mohr Short Fiction Award, the Stella Kupferberg Memorial Prize, and has been awarded grant and fellowship support from the Jentel Foundation, Centrum, the Hafer Family Foundation, and Artist Trust.

Amanda Ackerman is the author of four chapbooks: Sin is to Celebration (co-author, House Press), The Seasons Cemented (Hex Presse), I Fell in Love with a Monster Truck (Insert Press Parrot #8), and Short Stones (Dancing Girl Press). She is co-publisher and co-editor of the press Eohippus Labs. Amanda also writes collaboratively as part of the projects SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and UNFO. Her first full-length book, The Book of Feral Flora, is forthcoming from Les Figues press.

Moderator:

Teresa Carmody is also the author of Eye Hole Adore (PS Books, 2008) and Requiem (Les Figues, 2005), and the chapbooks I Can Feel (Insert Press, 2011) and Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne (Woodland Editions, 2009). She is co-founding director of Les Figues Press and currently teaches at California Institute of the Arts.