Sierra Fujita, HANNYA, 2024 (rehearsal image). Photograph by Corinne Schiavone.
In Their Own Image is a performance program curated by Chloë Flores featuring new work by performing artists Zackary Drucker, Sierra Fujita, Emily Lucid, Lara Salmon, Andrea Soto, and Dorian Wood. The program developed from an invitation to create work in response to VALIE EXPORT's series of physicalized performative actions and early feminist provocations known as Body Configurations. The artists were asked to consider this body of work within the specific context of the Schindler House in Los Angeles, CA, where select works from this series will be exhibited. Each artist engaged the proposition with work that responds to—and subverts—the spatial contexts of the Schindler House, just as EXPORT’s interventions in public space reframed the spatialized female body.
The work of EXPORT and other early feminist artists fostered a more inclusive, intersectional, and supportive movement for these artists today whose creative practices bring visibility to the complexities of contemporary femme experience. Their various creative expressions highlight the persistent challenges of gender and social disparity in contemporary culture, and open more nuanced understandings of femme and human experience in the world. As such, their performative creations enhance awareness of structural ableism, labor disparities, gender privileges, identity, and unequal representation. Through works that pay tribute to VALIE EXPORT's dismantling practices, In Their Own Image unravels the constructs that comprise traditional subjectivities to open space and possibility for beings and forms that are here, and those that are still yet to come.
The doors open at 12:30 pm, performances are from 1 pm to 4:30 pm, and a reception follows.
Zackary Drucker’s Door Girl pays homage to her formative years studying art and developing a performance practice at CALARTS, while greeting and admitting partygoers at Downtown LA's queer club Shit’s and Giggles in the aughts. Inspired by her teacher Michael Asher, master of subtle interventions in museums and forebearer of 'institutional critique,' Drucker will be the door girl greeting visitors as they enter the MAK Center. In a time when social mores have been dissolved by the ubiquity of people's primary relationship with their phones, having face-to-face interactions is more radical and necessary than ever. As a multimedia artist and filmmaker, Drucker’s work amplifies the voices of women and gender expansive people, and celebrates the richness and complexity of transgender identity, history, and community building.
Sierra Fujita will present HANNYA, a performance intended to subvert representation, deeply rooted in her intersectional identity as a queer mixed-race dance artist with Japanese and Austrian roots. Drawing inspiration from the Schindler House design and EXPORT’s impulse to “break out from society’s binary code,” Fujita destabilizes the material signifiers of Japanese culture, layering them on top of one another to challenge society’s way of perceiving/seeing and our own relationship to tokenism and fetishism, while simultaneously celebrating cultural heritage.
Lara Salmon is a performance artist whose work addresses living in chronic pain, an internal experience which she gives visibility to through her work. sURGE is a durational performance where audiences are invited to regulate the level of electricity entering her body through a tens unit, commonly used to manage chronic pain. For sURGE, Salmon’s body acts as a sculptural signifer to her presence and pain, highlights architectural and structural elements, and pays homage to EXPORT’s Body Configurations and Tap and Touch Cinema.
As a movement-based artist, Andrea Soto resources her body to inscribe the city’s mechanical landscape through the erosion of her female body as a material among many. Inspired by EXPORT’s desire to escape social codification, Multitude (1) is Soto's attempt for a dissolution of memories shaped by practices of power and gender. In Multitude (2), Soto lays out a gestural map that moves through the house and garden, trailing the trenches from water remediation and the inherent crevices at the Schindler house. She re-spatializes the unearthed landscape and examines her assumed identity through a constant corporeal negotiation.
Emily Lucid’s ‘Minotaur’ rewrites the Greek myth of Heracles into a trans feminist performance art experiment wherein Lucid’s trans female body interprets the character Heracles. Unlike the myth, Heracles does not kill the Minotaur (portrayed by Kyle Patrick Roberts). Instead, the hero and monster fall unconditionally in love and endure the labyrinth together in a healthy long term romantic relationship. Lucid’s ‘Minotaur’ is an attempt at an allegorical affirmation that to be trans and/or trans attracted is ancient, safe, rich with love, inherent and a human right. Costume design by Fear Safe
Out of a practice and desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people, multi-disciplinary artist Dorian Wood will bring visibility to invisible labor with Carry us, nourish them (prayer). For this itinerant performance work, she will move through Schindler House using their body and breath to honor the contracted laborers responsible for the initial construction and subsequent restorations of the building.
ZACKARY DRUCKER
Zackary Drucker is an American multimedia artist, director, and producer who has dedicated her work to telling stories that expand our cultural understanding of difference. Her credits include directing the Hulu Original documentary Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl; and co-directing the Sundance award-winning HBO original documentary film The Stroll and the HBO documentary series The Lady and the Dale. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial 2014, MoMA PS1, Hammer Museum, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA San Diego, and SF MoMA, among others.
SIERRA FUJITA
Sierra Fujita (b. at home in San Diego, 1995) is a queer, Japanese multi-hyphenate artist: actor, dancer, model, choreographer and director in LA. She was a competitive gymnast in her early years which influences her athletic contemporary movement as a strong foundation. Some of her credits include Cirque du Soleil, national tours with Simone Biles and Jamie xx, Netflix, A24, Noah Cyrus, Shygirl, Banks, LA Times, LA Opera and multiple full length dance shows and short films she’s created and curated. Sierra thrives on pushing personal and project boundaries, and her canvas extends beyond conventional grounds. She doesn’t like to limit herself to any norms or boxes and always likes to keep her intuition and ambition flowing.
EMILY LUCID
Emily Lucid is a Jewish trans female thinker and maker living with schizoaffective disorder. Lucid focuses primarily on the question of ‘performance’. A graduate of California Institute of The Arts: Lucid is an experimental writer, performance artist, visual artist, sound artist, curator and actor. Lucid’s work deals with her interest in transgender rights, psychology, technology and beauty. She has read, performed, curated and exhibited at galleries, theaters, web portals and festivals across Los Angeles and beyond.
LARA SALMON
Lara Salmon is a performance artist whose work addresses the experience of chronic pain. Having lived in pain for most of her life, Lara is hyper-vigilant to physicality. The fight to retain mobility finds expression in the extremity and duration of her art. Lara lives in Los Angeles, California. She has had nine solo and over thirty group exhibitions in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. Lara was awarded the Grand Prix of the 2021 Larnaca Biennale in Cyprus. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as The Invisible Archive, Alpha News, and the Los Angeles Daily News.
ANDREA SOTO
Andrea Soto (she/ella), is a first-generation Mexican American movement artist and collaborator. Her craft lives in performance and data-gathering, holding the body as the temple of pleasure and truth system. Andrea builds poetic ecosystems rooted in the dismantling of hierarchical-systems across mediums. Her recent work has been shared at Human Resources and Highways Performance Space, and she last performed at Untitled Art Fair Miami. Andrea lives in Los Angeles, and holds a BFA in Dance from California Institute of the Arts. She was awarded the Barbara Ensley Award on behalf of the Merce Cunningham Trust in 2024.
DORIAN WOOD
Dorian Wood (she/they) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose intent of “infecting” spaces and ideologies is born from a desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people. Her work has been presented at institutions around the world, including The Broad (Los Angeles), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Museo Nacional Del Prado (Madrid) and Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris (Mexico City). Wood is a recipient of a 2023 LA County Performing Arts Recovery Grant, a 2023 City of Los Angeles Individual Master Artist Project Grant, a 2023 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, a 2020 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Art Matters Foundation Grant. In 2023, Wood premiered Canto de Todes, a mutating 12-hour composition/installation.
CHLOË FLORES
Chloë Flores is a Latinx Yaqui Native curator and arts writer, editor, advisor, and producer whose work centers on body-based, performative, and site-specific practices and the production of culture in public space. She is the Executive and Artistic Director of homeLA, a LA-based performance organization and platform for experimental and site-specific dance, performance, and art. Flores founded and directed GuestHaus Residency (2011-2023), was Programs Director at Heidi Duckler Dance (2021-22), and co-founded the Los Angeles Dance Worker Coalition (LADWC) that developed/launched the first dance-specific grant program for the Los Angeles’ DCA Performing Arts Division (2022). Flores has worked in the arts in Los Angeles since 1999, co-founded/co-directed enView Gallery in Long Beach from 2005-2008, and received her MA in Curatorial Practices in 2011 from USC. Over the years, she has worked on exhibitions, programs and texts for the following organizations: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Office, The Armory Center for the Arts, Dance Resource Center, Monte Vista Projects, Cypress College, The Sweeney Art Gallery at UC Riverside, Anthony Greaney, Sierra Nevada College, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House and at the Mackey Garage Top, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and The Box.
VALIE EXPORT: Embodied is organized by MAK Center Director Jia Yi Gu with Seymour Polatin, Exhibitions and Programs Manager, Brian Taylor, Curatorial Assistant, and Maeve Atkinson, Education and Engagement Coordinator.
The exhibition is made possible with support from Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Betsy Greenberg, the Austrian Consulate General Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Arts and Culture Department, and MAK Center’s Centennial Council.
In Their Own Image is presented in partnership with homeLA.
Related Exhibition
VALIE eXPORt: EMBODIED
February 28, 2024 — April 7, 2024
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