NEW YORK FLOWER FESTIVAL 2018

August 3 - 12, 2018

Essex Flowers proudly announces the 3rd Annual New York Flower Festival - the original, late-summer performance festival - a trend that is rapidly becoming tradition for many downtown galleries who are committed to showcasing vanguard live performance. NYFF will be a rollicking, nightly, week-plus of sound, movement, readings, monologues, comedy, talk-shows and the unexpected. Daily calendar, along with further details and performer bios, is below.

Friday August 3 | 6:30pm

King Arthur Rock Review
Andrea Merkx

The King Arthur Rock Review will reunite collaborators from the King Arthur Rock Opera exhibition cycle for a single evening as the start of the third annual Essex Flowers Festival. “Panelists” in the review have been invited to give short, ten minute lectures on their practice.

The assembly will provide a sampling of the numerous collaborators from the King Arthur Rock Opera, a series of 5 exhibitions originally organized by Merkx&Gwynne beginning in 2013. Nathan Gwynne and Andrea Merkx will provide introductory remarks for the assembled panelists, and screen never before released excerpts from the project.

Previous collaborators assemble in an orchestral body, presenting images and remarks on their individual artistic practices, or really, do whatever they would like with the 10 minute time slot. The goal of the review is to assemble a social body, and to promote exchange.
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Andrea Merkx received her MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York. She has exhibited and performed at international venues such as the Or Gallery, BC, Circuit, CH; Tidens Krav, NO; along with New York venues such as Bureau, PS1, Bowery Ballroom, CBGB Gallery, Irving Plaza, and Terminal 5. Since 2012 she has been working as part of Merkx&Gwynne, a collaborative framework for interdisciplinary experimentation in group-exhibition-cum-musicvideo-set production and opera.
http://merkxandgwynne.tumblr.com/
https://www.instagram.com/dredreisme/?hl=en
https://vimeo.com/user788107

Saturday August 4th | 7:30pm

Lizard Prints
Rufus Tureen and Monica Palma

We experience art making as a push and pull between interiority and exteriority, between the body in space and the body as it perceives itself in space. All relationships are relations of power. Marks are traces of ownership, psychic and real.

Rufus Tureen is an Artist/Performer living and working in Brooklyn. His performance work has been seen worldwide, including Stockholm Sweden and Turku Finland (in collaboration with Johan Bergström Hyldahl), at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Alaska's Perseverance Theater, Five Myles Gallery, Present Co. Gallery, Essex Flowers and The Kitchen with Courtesy The Artist.
www.rufustureen.com

Monica Palma's work resonates with geometric motifs of Mexican/Pre-Colombian textiles and the cadence of Catholic prayers—two concepts that for her are psychically linked, syncretism experienced as synesthesia. She has had two solo shows at Ortega y Gasset Projects in New York and has been included in exhibitions at TSA Gallery, The Brucennial, NURTURE/nature at 245 Varet Street and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO. Her work has been reviewed in Art Forum and Art in America.www.monicapalma.com

Saturday August 4th | 8:30pm

The Sammy Jessy Raphael Show Live!
Sameer Kapoor

The Sammy Jessy Raphael Show is a late night talk show which has entertained audiences across the world with it's heady combination of music, comedy, celebrity interviews, and philosophical ruminations on death and despair.

All are invited to attend a live taping of a very special episode held in conjunction with the Flowers Festival where musical guests, artists, and the audience will get together and try to understand what it means to be a Flower in a world full of pesticide.
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Sameer Kapoor is an artist who works in the realms of video, sound, performance, and comedy. He has performed at various hotel bars and retirement homes, as well as venues such as LMAK gallery, Constance, The Manhattan Inn, NADA and PS1 (with Seung Min-Lee), The Last Weekend, The Bicycle Film Festival, Spring Break (with Dome Theater), The Museum of Art and Design (with ESP-TV), and once this performance has been completed, Essex Flowers.

Sunday August 5 | 4pm

Tripod Sweep
Savannah Knoop

Tripod Sweep (2014-2018) is an interactive, durational performance that grapples with defining power and conflict within a set of terms.

A non-verbal character, who is expressive through movement alone, approaches individual members of the audience with a movement borrowed from Brazilian Jiu Jitsu called The Tripod Sweep, in which one attaches one's own legs to the hip of another person, destabilizing the other's two-legged base. The game is based on action, reaction, and rest. When observed by an audience, the game revolves around the legibility and invisibility of assumptions; who is approached, who engages, and what factors determine feelings of “winning” and "losing" in a public sphere?
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Savannah Knoop is a New York-based artist who insights strategies of permission through writing, performance, and object-making. In 2001, Savannah Knoop founded the clothing line Tinc, which ran until 2009, with creative partner Parachati Pattajotti. From 2009-2016 they co-hosted the monthly queer audio-visual party WOAHMONE. They received their BA at at CUNY BA under the mentorship of Vito Acconci, and their MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Sculpture + Extended Media. They have shown and performed at the Whitney, ICA Philadelphia, SculptureCenter, Movement Research, VCU, Alfred University, Yale, CAVEDetroit, and ACP in Los Angeles. In 2007, they published the memoir titled "Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy" (Amy Scholder, Seven Stories Press) cataloguing their experiences of playing their sister in law's (Laura Albert's) writing persona and avatar JT Leroy. In 2018 it was made into the major motion picture "Jeremiah Terminator Leroy" co-written, and co-executive produced by Savannah and director Justin Kelly, starring Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern. Savannah has studied dance and martial arts for over twenty years. They are currently a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu under Marcelo Garcia.
https://www.savannahknoop.net/new-page/
https://www.instagram.com/savattte/?hl=en

Sunday August 5 | 7:30pm

Our Play
Written and Directed by Millie Kapp
Performed by Millie Kapp and Noah Furman
Violin interludes performed by Jennifer Gersten

"There was nothing about the landscape the eye could settle on. The eye was constantly adrift. Almost as if it were experiencing a small panic."
- David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives

There was a path in the woods to the turquoise sea. A pine forest, the floor of which was spongy and covered in needles. The woods were dense and fertile feeling, teeming with life but no movement, like they had been frozen and only the tree roots grow silently beneath the loam. Mushrooms sat like tiny ancient figurines dotting the earth. A pathway lead out of the forest and suddenly on top of a dune, emerged through dry branches to a windless and flattened horizon. Our campsite was crouched between rough roots before the ground became a sloping bank of white sand. At night it was dark on the path and hard to see.

The landscape seemed endless and abandoned, a figureless ground. The moon was out in the morning and hung in the sky like a reminder of our own orbit. On the beach there were hardly any animals. The occasional sea gull. The water was swampy and still but suggested the vast lifeless expanse of space. There wasn't much life in the water either. The naked powdery beach, strung out between the crowded woods and monotone sea, seemed to be the only place conducive to human habitation, the only place we were significant between two abysses.
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Millie Kapp New York-based performing artist. Kapp has presented her performance work across the United States and was previously adjunct faculty at Stony Brook University.

Noah Furman is an artist and teacher living in Brooklyn. He finished a master in fine arts at Hunter College in 2015. He makes work in painting, sculpture and performance.

Jennifer Gersten is a freelance writer and musician.

Monday August 6 | 1-9pm

Paper Gutter

Vortexity Books and Book Row Present a day of Book Selling, Mix-Tape DJs, Live Performances, Art and Poetry Readings

*3pm Performances by: Carolyn Lockhart Schoerner, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
*7pm Readings by: Nicole Wallace, John Coletti, Peter BD, Alissa Bennett

Artwork by: Ryan Foerster, Mattie Goedecke, Adam Opet, Yusuke Okada, Caroline Schub, Yoni Zonszein, Sara Glick

Tape Mixes From: BOB, Jezenia, Adam Opet, Bene and Matt

Small Presses: Heinzfeller Nileisist, Ratstar Press, Bunny JR. Tapes, IMP, Dripper World, Papertown Company, Noa Danish, Discipline Press, Vortexity, Solution, Black Tower Editions, Adventures Ltd. Press, F Magazine, Matt Kenny and more.

Additional performances, readers and presses TBA!

Vortexity Books is a book stand in the East Village since 2014 located on the corner of Ave A and St. Marks and opens spontaneously 3 days a week. The shop is run by Jen Fisher.
https://www.instagram.com/vortexity_jen_fisher/?hl=en

Book Row is a used bookstore in Bushwick since 2014 Located 867 Broadway The store is open every day 12-9pm. The shop is run by Dave Morse and Matt D'Angelo.
https://www.instagram.com/better_read_than_dead_bk/?hl=en

Tuesday August 7 | 7:30pm

Anatomy of a Collision
Victoria Keddie

Victoria Keddie is an artist working within cross disciplines of sound, video, installation, and performance. Keddie is the Co-Director of E.S.P. TV, a nomadic TV studio that hybridizes technologies to realize synthetic environments and deconstruct the televisual for live performance. She co founded, UNIT 11, a re outfitted ENG van, which acts as her own mobile studio for transmission based field work. Keddie is currently building a "Satellite Studio" in the Mohave desert for her work and research involving space junk.

Keddie has an MA from New York University and a BFA from University of the Arts in Philadelphia with a Mobility Fellowship at the California College of Arts in San Francisco, CA. She has lectured and has been an invited guest artist at Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, Bennington College, Hunter College, Cranbrook Academy, University of Oregon, Eugene, PNCA, University of Colorado, Boulder, NADA Art Fair, Museum of Arts and Design, IMDA/ Electra Festival, Wassaic Project, and Studio XX, Montreal. Keddie had taught televisual broadcast at Marymount College and Pioneer Works.

Keddie has performed and exhibited internationally at venues and festivals such as, The Barbican, Fridman Gallery, The Swiss Institute, Pioneer Works,The Kitchen, Museum of Moving Image, The Museum of Art and Design, Queens Museum of Art, Microscope Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Lightcone, (Paris), Syros International Film Festival (Syros, Greece), Studio XX (Montreal), LOOP Festival (Barcelona), Pallas Projects (Dublin), Reykjavik Arts Festival (Reykjavik), General Public (Berlin), Axis Art Centre (Crew), The Independent Film Festival (Naples), Liste Art Fair (Basel), Seeing Sound Festival (Bath), and Daimon (Gatineau). Keddie has been artist-in-residence at Koneen Saatio, Yaddo, Wave Farm, Signal Culture, Pioneer Works, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the Museum of Arts and Design.

Video works are distributed through Lightcone, (Paris) and The Filmmakers Co-op (NYC). Sound works released with Spectral Evidence (Cambridge, MA), In Context Music (NYC), and Robert & Leopold (NYC).
http://www.victoriakeddie.com/
http://www.esptv.com/
https://lightcone.org/en/filmmaker-2631-victoria-keddie
https://soundcloud.com/victoriakeddie
http://incontextmusic.com/ICM013
https://www.instagram.com/vict_0r/
#victoriakeddie

Wednesday August 8 | 6:30pm

Outlines
Cortney Andrews

Cortney Andrews creates cinematic videos, performances, and photographs. Through careful choreography, she portrays scenes that challenge physical and psychological thresholds.

Working with a group of performers, she builds actions into narratives that confront ideas about the social construction of power, desire and gender.

In this dream-like vignette, the struggle to reveal oneself is investigated through a symbolic shedding of coats.
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Cortney Andrews is an artist working in video, choreography and photography. Born and raised in Kansas, Andrews received her MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014 and Yaddo in 2013. Andrews has exhibited in New York, Detroit, London, Los Angeles, and throughout the US, and staged performances at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics and Jack Hanley Gallery. She is the recent recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund Grant for Performance Art and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. Her solo exhibition at 106 Green Gallery in Brooklyn, NY was reviewed by Artforum and chosen as a Critics’ Pick.

Andrews is the Co-founder and Director of Offshore Residency, a traveling artists residency program on a sailboat. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Wednesday August 8 | 7:30pm

Y2K Presents: Forever

Y2K’s sales representatives have departed from The After Eden Agency. They bring their experience of showcasing objects from a catalogue of capital vices, to now present you with objects for Eternity. Objects beyond even you. Different levels of Forever available, including special Limited Editions. Forever: it’s the only thing you can sell anymore. Live on Instagram
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Y2K is Carlos Rigau, Emmy Catedral, and Jocelyn Spaar. Founded in the winter of 1999, Y2K exists beyond time but not money. Y2K is forever--with your sponsorship--and with that, look forward to all funding opportunities (all). Y2K performs through images, moving images, publications, and IRL. Y2K is interested in human monetary exchange amidst timekeeping failures, apocalyptic opportunities, and empty promises of a long now. Each Y2K agent has been the recipient of the B12 Award at some point or another. Y2K is currently developing a script for a summer blockbuster 4:33 starring Nick Cage, and is a sometime auction house and advisory service. 10101010101010101010101010101.
http://y2klovesu.com/

Thursday August 9 | 7:30pm

Georges Jacotey
Erica Magrey
Sandy Smiles

rarest millennial aphroditus pepe caught on cam
Georges Jacotey

“A millennial aphroditus pepe is the larval stage in the life cycle of a meme toad. Withdrawn and unassertive they are rarely spotted even by digital natives.” - Wikipedia.org

Rarest aphroditus pepe is an online performance and the embryonic stage of Georges Jacotey’s later developed, fanfic, mashup character Lana Del Pepe. In this dramatic rendering of a live adult cam show, Jacotey is reflecting on the affect of hegemonic cultures and discourses on their own gender journey and the aggregation of recurrent identity crises into a conflicted and inconsistent œuvre.
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Georges Jacotey (b. 1987) is a Greek artist who works with performance and digital media. They are currently invested in issues of queer representation and resistance, the divide between cultural hegemonies and subcultures (on and off-line) and the headache of keeping up under constant crisis. Their work has been recently shown at Manifesta 11 (Zürich), Interrupted =" Cyfem and Queer (Berlin), Scottish Queer International Film Festival (Glasgow), Nu Performance Festival (Tallinn) and dgtl-fmnsm Festival (Hellerau-Dresden), among other places.
http://georgesjacotey.com/

Thursday August 9 | 8pm

Prop Body
Erica Magrey
performed with Chris Carlone

Prop Body demos tropes and gestures associated with female-ness situated in relation to a male presence, including expressions of agency, objecthood, fantasy, and hysteria. Performed with Chris Carlone.
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Erica Magrey is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist working with video, performance, music, costume, sculpture, photography, and set design. She was a resident of NYC studio programs Smack Mellon (2016-2017) and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2014-2015), the 2011 NY Artist in Residence with Atelier Mondial in Basel, Switzerland, and a 2012 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work. Career highlights include screenings, performances and exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park, The Sculpture Center, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Kaskadenkondensator (Basel), The Kitchen, 106 Green, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Essex Flowers, Magic Pictures (Philadelphia, PA), Freight + Volume, and Storefront for Art and Architecture.
www.ericamagrey.com
https://www.instagram.com/ericamagrey/

Thursday August 9 | 8:30pm

Sandy Smiles
Frank Haines

Her debut was one year ago in Chinatown. Sandy Smiles is a dream half remembered on a drug salted brain.
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Frank Haines is a psychonaut, writer, magician, amateur mycologist, and artist living and working in Chinatown.
https://www.instagram.com/heinzfeller/
#sandysmiles will bring up some things

Friday August 10 | 7:30pm

Flower Festival: A Reading at Essex Flowers

Michael Dumanis is the author of the poetry collection My Soviet Union, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and coeditor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Recent poems have appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Iowa Review, and The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Project. He is the editor of Bennington Review, and is a member of the Literature Faculty at Bennington College.

Erica Ehrenberg’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Slate, The New Republic, Guernica, and The Bennington Review. She has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford, and a poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Monica Ferrell is the author of three books, most recently the poetry collection You Darling Thing, forthcoming from Four Way in September 2018. Her novel The Answer Is Always Yes (Dial Press/Random House) was a Booklist Top Ten Debut Novel of the Year and her first collection of poems, Beasts for the Chase, was a finalist for the Asian American Writers Workshop Prize in Poetry and won the Sarabande Books Kathryn A. Morton Prize. She has taught fiction and poetry for the MFA Program at Columbia University, and is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Purchase College (SUNY).

Molly Prentiss was born in Santa Cruz, California in 1984. Her first novel, Tuesday Nights in 1980, was longlisted for The Center For Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, as well as the Gran Prix de Litterature Americane in France. She currently lives Brooklyn, New York, where she is at work on her second book.
http://www.mollyprentiss.com/

Maria Rapoport is a New York–based writer who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her work has appeared in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She received awards and fellowships from the Iowa Review, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. She is currently completing a collection of experimental short fiction.
http://www.mariarapoport.com/

Saturday August 11 | 12-10pm

DEMONSTRATION
Primitive Languages

15 artists are invited to “demonstrate” a subject, object, or process related to their practice. Coming from a range of backgrounds, from poetry to film to music, Primitive Languages has invited these artists in the interest of presenting work separate from their usual disciplinary contexts. In the spirit of the concept of festival, this exhibition will host a large volume of aesthetic content and encourage the social aspects of art making and community building.

There are also plans to BBQ.

Primitive Languages is a musical imprint formed in Brooklyn, New York in early 2014. The project releases editions of music and non-music for artists in America. The aesthetic narrative of the curation is non-linear by nature and follows connections often made through traveling. Primitive Languages is ran by Miguel Alvariño and Nick Klein.

https://primitivelanguages.bandcamp.com/
https://soundcloud.com/primitive-languages

Cristine Brache (b.1984, Miami) is an artist and writer of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent living and working between Miami and Toronto. She holds an MFA in Fine Art Media from the Slade School of Fine Art (London, UK). Recent exhibitions include FIERMAN, New York; Team Gallery, New York; MOCA, Miami; Bow Arts, London; The Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Collectif Jeune Cinéma, Paris; and Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover. Her poetry has been published in Publishing Genius, New York Tyrant, Fanzine, Apogee, and E Ratio Postmodern Poetry Journal, among others. Writing about her work has appeared in The New Yorker, and Cordite Poetry Review. For more information visit: cristinebrache.info

Sapphogeist is a filter which channels symbolic corrosion into a substance which may act as purifier, nullifier or destroyer. Within and adjacent to Sapphogeist only the mirror is consistent, and as the eyes and bodies of others become interlocked with it they are inverted point by point. Every word spoken by Sapphogeist immediately collapses within its enunciation. As Sapphogeist, transdisciplinary artist Zoe Burke (b.1991) crafts a poetry of extinction that's both distant and intimate, elegant and fleeting, delicate and heavy, with driving glacial noise-pop and unflinching lyric’s. Zoe Burke is based in Brooklyn and has toured with Sapphogeist several times over the past 2 years. Sapphogeist is released on Bank Records and No Rent Records.

Autumn Casey (b. 1987, Dallas) draws on a variety of personal relics and pop-cultural ephemera, both abject and singular, to challenge and question her own subjectivity against the world at large. Her practice, which moves from sculpture to collage, as well as video performances, considers the history of the found object and assemblage-redeploying existing materials or moments in unexpected, idiosyncratic ways. The result is a body of work that vibrates along the tense cord between the personal and the vernacular. She studied sculpture at the New World School of the Arts (BFA 2011). Her work is collected by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, where she won the 2010 Optic Nerve XII, The Pérez Art Museum Miami, and in private collections in Miami and New York City. She has collaborated with Snoop Dogg and Boys Noize. Casey currently lives and works in Philadelphia.

Domingo Castillo
How do you write about an artist whose work is about everything but the work itself?

Miguel Enrique Alvarino is an electronic producer and half label head of Primitive Languages. He has released records on labels such as Hot Releases, Bank Records NYC, and apart on various compilations from small north american tape labels to larger record labels based around Europe. He utilizes modular synths to perform live demonstrations of distorted rhythms packed with anxiety tinged bass drums, frenetic instrumentation, and little breathing room. A hybridity touching on industrial palettes with the use of proper rave pacing and progression.

Carlos Gonzalez is an artist who lives and works in Providence, RI.He produces comics, music, and videos. He was born in 1984 in Tampa, FL. His comic work includes the science fiction melodrama 'Slime Freak' and the erotic psycho-drama 'Test Tube' and the forthcoming graphic novel 'Gates of Plasma'. His music is released as 'Russian Tsarlag'. His most recent feature length video 'Forgotten World' was released digitally and on VHS by Pleasure Editions.

Rob Goyanes is a writer, musician, and curator. His writing—which spans essay, criticism, fiction, and poetry—has appeared in e-flux journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, the 2018 New Museum Triennial catalogue, and elsewhere. On his writing, The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “That sounds right.” As Bobby Flan he’s had releases on Primitive Languages, 2100, and is forthcoming on Enmossed. As a curator he’s organized exhibitions of music and performance at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and in many other places. He’s from Miami but lives in New York City.

Daren Ho is a musician and sound artist based in New York City, New York. He is one of the founding members of the retail store and institution Control and has released music on Root Strata, NNA Tapes, and Spectrum Spools under various guises.

Nick Klein is a sound and sculpture based artist from south Florida, currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Klein's work is interested in the social potential of the implementation of rhythmic electronic music in a communal setting. Klein co-founded the label Primitive Languages alongside artist and musician Miguel Enrique Alvariño. Primitive Languages functions as a humble overview of the eclectic electric American underground. In conjunction with his administrative efforts with the label, he is a prolific maker and performer interested in mining the tropic nature of electronic music sub-genres. The range of Klein's output exists in editions on distinguished labels around the world such as L.I.E.S. Records, Alter, Bank Records, Ascetic House, Angoisse, Private Archive, and Unknown Precept. He is a contributing writer for the Swiss magazine, Zweikommasieben.

V Manuscript is poet / pervert / blasphemme. The texts of V Manuscript are constructed using a combination of writing and quarreling with grammar machines—algorithmically assisted text regeneration methods are mis/used, then cut-up, edited, re-poeticized and re-inserted back into a master narrative. The intimacy necessary for the project hinges on blood-stamped self-published chapbooks and intense live performances combining text and music which underscore ornate corporeal and poetically virulent practices of endurance, tension and concentration. A variety of ritual objects and occult materials – rope, needles, knives – are employed and often amplified in performance. The many V Manuscripts focus on the absence of absolutes and the marginalia of masochism, eroticism and the fluidity of gender. V Manuscript runs the small press VILE_TYPE, the reading series The Empty Room, and collaborates w Maralie in the performance duo HUMANBEAST.

Katy Mongeau is a writer currently living in New York. A recent graduate of Brown University’s Literary Arts MFA program, she has work in various online and print publications.

Noise Nomads is the sound project of Western Massachusetts noise artist Jeff Hartford. For just under two decades Noise Nomads has existed as a standard bearer of DIY sonic arts practice in the United States. Noise Nomads has toured extensively and released on RRR Records, Ultra Eczema, and is founder of Bonescraper Records.

Rachel Ruth Lewallen (RRLEW) is a performance artist currently based out of Brooklyn, NY. Hailing previously from Rhode Island and North Carolina, RRLEW uses the materials of technology (music/voices made by computer), lights, movement, costume, and speech to build Rube Goldberg machine-like live performances that transport audiences through fantasy realities, perverted nightmares, profound heartbreaks, moments of beauty, sadness, humor, and manic joy. RRLEW uses these strange worlds (which are built only for the purposes of being destroyed) as test sites for her own twisted ideas about lesbianism, gay conversion therapy, southern queerness, vulnerability, Aileen Wuornos, club music, mad scientists, traffic court judges in New England, the comedic absurdity that is the white heterosexal cis man, kink, TaTU, and whatever else she’s into at the moment. Her work is fairly non-intellectual, and has been presented at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Lab, and in countless DIY queer, punk, and noise spaces around the country.

Soren Roi is an artist and musician born and based in New York City. His work currently involves using modular synthesis to construct dense techno landscapes. Roi has released on Ascetic House and has forthcoming work for Primitive Languages. Roi had curated the Nothing Changes party for 5 years.

Scant is the drone and dark ambient project of Matt Boettke. Born in Virginia, Boettke was paramount in developing and sustaining the noise scene in Richmond. As an artist Scant has toured the country numerous times and released on stalwarts of the American noise scene. For the last year Boettke has been half purveyor of Thousands Of Dead Gods, a tape label and storefront in Brooklyn specializing in distribution of the worlds contemporary noise culture.

Sunday August 12 | 7:30pm

Cafe Yes! Presents: Everybody Gets Soup
With your host TD Sidell
...and comedians: Eleanore Pienta, Dale Seever, Julia Shiplett, Ike Ufomadu, Lorelei Ramirez and Sonia Denis

Cafe Yes! Presents Everybody Gets Soup is a collaboration between TD Sidell, Maura Madden, and Rufus Tureen on a night of food and comedy. TD Sidell will host and make soup throughout the program as comedians do their bits and at the end everybody gets soup. Everybody who stays till the end at least, we are not sure if you can legally mail soup but if you leave early and want to find out please leave your address behind. We believe this is New York's only DIY comedy cooking show but it's a big city so maybe we're wrong, it's at least the only one happening at Essex Flowers.

TD Sidell is a comedian, writer, and artist who lives in Queens. He writes and performs sketch comedy on various stages throughout the city with his group OK Meatplace. He is currently undertaking a project in which he cooks recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking and writes about his experiences, yes he has heard about the movie about the woman who has already done that. His writing has appeared online and in print for the Boston Phoenix, The Classical, and The Tardy Eagle. He also makes ceramic mugs and has shown those mugs in group shows at NADA New York and Ed Varie, he makes the mugs under the rubric Mugs By TD.
https://www.instagram.com/douglassape/
https://www.facebook.com/bigidigits
http://apairofcrepeswiththerarestape.tumblr.com/