"Torn, Disassembled and Ostensibly Glamorous In The Cyber Age": An Evening With Juliana Huxtable

An artist, writer and, as DJ, a veritable steward of the New York nightlife scene, Juliana Huxtable will deliver a mix of performances and readings tomorrow night at Franklin Street Works through the signature personas of Internet-addicted cyborg, priestess, witch and trans girl.

At a time when such topics as LGBT recognition, sexual violence in the armed forces (click here for a related PA entry) and the creepy acquisition by a leading search engine of a series of leading military robot manufacturers pepper the news, her staple fascinations with human identity, physicality, technology and the cross-fertilization of such themes could not be more timely, and will be expressed with the help of friends from the fomenting Manhattan creative 

underground.

Anachronism (2013)

A contributor to the ongoing FSW exhibit, Neuromast: Certain Uncertainty and Contemporary Art, Juliana is a member of the House of Ladosha art collective and has written for, or been referenced in, Maker Magazine, ArtForum and Mousse. Click here for a recent interview. She has appeared at Envoy Enterprises, Artists Space, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and other New York venues. The Juliana 1 video from her Vimeo channel has unrestrained observations on urban pretension, body objectification and gender expression in character-based video games. Get a feel for her punchy delivery in this hilarious segment from TMI:

You can contact and keep up with Juliana's activities on Facebook.

When:

Saturday, March 1, 2014

5:30-7:30 PM

Where:

Franklin Street Works

41 Franklin Street

Stamford, CT 06901

Phone/e-mail:

203-595-5211

info@franklinstreetworks.org

The "Socially-Acceptable Insanity" Of Being In Love... With Someone Else's Idea Of It

Richard Duffee

In the first of two provocative area presentations this week in response to Valentine’s Day, Hello, I Love You, Won’t You Tell Me Your Name? will plumb the Crusades, church/state relations, Islamic poetry, women's rights and other topics when Richard Duffee shares his research and conclusions at Curly’s tomorrow night at 7:30 regarding the origins of the wildly impossible conception of romantic love, incorporated as part of modern industrial life.

A PoemAlley fixture, egalitarian analyst of social power and author (The Slow News of Need, available from the “Collections and Anthologies” section below), Richard elaborates: “The shocking thing about Western love poetry is that the tradition does not assume one needs to know anything about the recipient of one's affections in order for one's claims to love to be credible. It's difficult to realize how weird this is because it's a feature of the cultural landscape that's been around for 900 years.” 

Because the output of Medieval troubadours and trobairitz (female troubadours) reflected their own romantic conceptions, as opposed to actual people, this helped set the stage, along with numerous intertwined social influences, for the senhalic, or fill-in-the-blank, adaptability of, well, affected affections as purveyed by today’s “sentiment-industrial complex” of greeting cards, candy, door-stopper-grade bridal magazines and wedding planning consultancies.

As for Tinsletown’s generous contributions, Spike Jonze’s Her (Warner Bros./Annapurna Pictures, 2013) makes a strikingly insightful break from this cheapening fixation in its portrayal of an emotionally hollowed-out divorcee’s romance with a self-learning computer program, set against a day-after-tomorrow Los Angeles which is, appropriately, Hallmark Card-cozy, while stringent in its devotion to socially-received (as opposed to individual) relational expectations:

Ingrid Burrington

Also surveying the urban crossroads of devotion and the digital, New York artist Ingrid Burrington’s pre-Valentine’s Day talk Connection Over Missed Connections at Franklin Street Works will scrutinize romantic longing across various cities as mapped out through a leading Franklin Street Works online classifieds hub. “Analysis of Craigslist Missed Connections postings and communities,” notes Ingrid of her show Taxonomy of Missed Connections, “offers a glimpse into the loneliness and sexual tension that serve as the linchpin of any thriving metropolitan environment.”

Part of FSW’s Neuromast: Certain Uncertainty and Contemporary Art exhibition, Taxonomy of Missed Connections is also a component of Ingrid’s Center for Missed Connections project and its mission to encourage a collective embrace of loneliness, both poetic and banal, within public spaces.

Find out more about Ingrid at her website, lifewinning.com. A free exhibition, Neuromast is curated by Taliesen Gilkes-Bower and FSW Creative Director Terri C Smith and will be on view through March 9.

When:

Thursday, February 13, 2014

6:30-8:00 PM

Joaquin Phoenix in "Her"

Where:

Franklin Street Works

41 Franklin Street

Stamford, CT 06901

(Light snacks and a signature holiday drink to be served)

Phone/e-mail:
203-595-5211

info@franklinstreetworks.org