Sonia Oleniak's "Entropica..."

U-N-M-A-R-K-E-D Co-Artistic Director Sonia Oleniak's performative installation,
"EntropicA: Balance It Between The EYES" as part of SMUTOPIA! 

 

More on SMUTOPIA! here.

All Stars

Patrick Kennelly in "The All Stars of Non-Violet Communication"

"The All Stars of Non-Violet Communication" lands in Santa Monica after 2 hit performances this past spring in Hollywood & Chinatown.

As part of 18th St. Art Center's ART NIGHT, on September 24 @ 8.00pm, Highways Performance Space will be presenting a free performance of this tragicomic work from cult writer/director Asher Hartman.

This blue vaudevillian poem in three parts unleashes the vitriol of four dead, under-appreciated gay entertainers of the 1970s. Featuring veteran performers Franc Baliton, Michael Morrissey, Joe Seely, and myself, Patrick Kennelly, with costumes by sculptor Curt LeMieux and sound accompaniment by Corey Fogel (riffing on an original score by Jasmine Orpilla), Hartman stews a compact exploration of the brutality of language, the grief from which comedy emerges, and the ways in which language empties out
into the passage from life to death. Although brief, the work is written in a dense amalgam of poetic speech, one-liners, movement, and sound with plenty of bite and aftertaste.

CLICK HERE for video from the original performance @ Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in April of this year as part of the Thursday night performance series "So Funny It Hurts."  CLICK HERE for a posting on the 2nd performance (@ Human Resources in Chinatown) from the L.A. art blog tryharder (the picture below is from that posting).

Highways is located @ 1651 18th St., 1/2 block North of Olympic Blvd.

Vaccination

image by Patrick Kennelly

Yes, buzzy British band The Vaccines are just another over-hyped import, an uneven knock-off of The Strokes, itself a knock-off of any number of great rhythmic post-punk/edging on power pop acts.  But that doesn't neccessarily make it unpleasant - to the contrary, its innocuousness is more than a bit welcome in the ever-expanding glut.

But, more than anything, The Vaccines are an example of the rising power of the online video renaissance, where more and more experimentation and innovation has been wrapped around more and more of the same.  Their videos for the singles "Blow It Up" and "All in White" are supreme examples of how the image can both complement and often (as in this case) elevate the sonic.  These works get it just right (VHS+flares+fires+spotlights+corruption+slowmotion), while also nodding to the emerging "vintage"/"lo-fi" chic in a way that doesn't make the attached hipsterism soooooo offensive:

SMUTOPIA!

design by Patrick Kennelly

On May 20 + 21 (2011), I "pimped" out a performance party with Philip Littell in celebration of Highways Performance Space's 22nd Birthday. This crazy, untethered, occasionally erratic event was another of my experiments in "anti-art." By engaging the audience in the writing of the narrative, and allowing them to become part of the performance in construction, it had an excitement that fully realized the hyperbole of its promo description:

STAND UP AND SALUTE our Brave Boyz in Bootz, Ladies in Lonjeray, He-She's 'n' What-All! This year, in celebration of our 22nd Birthday, Highways Performance Space is going to take The Low Road, Transforming into An Erotic Hypnotic Hysteric Frenetic MIDWAY featuring Festival Stages, Private Booths, Stag Film Sets and THE PALACE OF PEEP and more! more! more!

Philip Littell & Patrick Kennelly pimp out over 30 Dirtee Artists in Continuous, Late Night Action! Nudie Cuties, Sin and Skin, Booze and Sleaze, the Highways to Hell...

Unfortunately, no pictures were taken of the event & some of the videotape has "mysteriously" gone missing, but here's some surviving stills. Hopefully more to come...

Cut-and-Paste

(mashup by Patrick Kennelly)

I'm in the early stages of development for the May 2012 premiere of PATTY, a rock concert/performative installation that utilizes a cast of performers who identify as “Woman” to question what “Woman” represents in a modern culture where one’s sense of self has become split across a multitude of both physical and virtual spatial platforms, most of which are mediated by the Male gaze. 

The process of constructing this work is inspired y the post-modern punk feminist, cut-up techniques of Kathy Acker. This allows a means of investigating hyper-evolving communication patterns dictated by a 140 character, browser tabbing, micro-blogging, linking matrix.

The result, hopefully, will have less a Mashed-up than Cubist visual and aural quality paired, hopefully, to a rhythmically taught pop backbeat.

We'll see.... in the meantime, some inspirations, references, etc :