"Oh, Yesterday" Jennifer Henry

July 16, 2021 by Available Space Art Projects

In June 2021 we welcomed artist Jennifer Henry to transform ASAP. She curtained off the space to create an intimate performance as well as feature NFT’s and photographic prints.

“I like to remember things better than they really were... brighter, braver and briefer. And I've never been sure it's all that important to tell the whole joke, if the punchline hits hard enough. So, as I dream up my performances - when I envision my players in their place - it's always a short and straight forward spectacle.

Glitter and glamour are the beguiling glue that holds the whole thing together, at least for a little while. And though the performance is as fleeting as the paper and plastic materials from which it is made... it's the experience that you're meant to take away.

Like the afterimage left on the inside of the eye when you're done looking but the mind still sees. It's not an exact copy of what you saw but an imperfect memorial of sorts. Cast with opposite colors, floating out before you as it fades.

“oh, yesterday” was loosely inspired by American playwright Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” and British pop stars The Beatles’ “Yesterday. " But really, it's its own riff on the quintessential existentialist exploration: how to understand the end is unavoidable and what we'll do until it gets here.” - Jennifer Henry

An ever-evolving exploration in transforming the everyday materials of plastic, cellophane, paper, ribbon and tape into otherworldly performative artworks, artist Jennifer Henry began making wearable pieces on a whim in 2009. Since then, her creations have been showcased in a wide array of venues including New York Fashion Week, SXSW (South by Southwest), Art Production Fund NY P3Studio, LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) Costume Council, Las Vegas City Hall, The Clark County Rotunda Gallery as well as numerous galleries and public spaces including recent shows in Ontario, Canada, Palm Springs, CA, Santa Fe, NM, Philadelphia, PA, Joshua Tree, CA. Jennifer's work has frequently been featured in national and local art, fashion, entertainment and news publications, radio and television programs. Born in Philadelphia, PA, Jennifer has been a resident of Las Vegas, NV since age 8 and credits the city's bombastic persona for her love of all things bold, beautiful and a bit over the top.

"How to Explain Electoral Politics Without Splitting Hares" Chad Scott

November 14, 2020 by Available Space Art Projects

The cornerstone of Democracy rests upon free and fair elections. However, recent efforts are undermining the electoral process through misinformation, voter intimidation, and outright attempts to disenfranchise voters from their constitutional right to cast a ballot. Rather than ensuring voting is safe and accessible during a global pandemic, these efforts are Wagering Life and Gambling with Democracy, ultimately forcing voters to choose between risking their health or risking their ballot.

These efforts are the newest tactics in a long history of voter suppression within the U.S., which ranges from denying citizens the right to vote to providing insurmountable challenges to participate in the electoral process through poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses.

This performance installation responds to the current situation vis-à-vis historical antecedents of voter suppression. Prior to entering the exhibition space, visitors will be presented with a relic of the civil rights era—a literacy test—that was selectively used to disenfranchise voters. Viewers become participants upon their consent to complete a literacy test. No personally identifiable information will be included on the test. Completed literacy tests will be used for a future exhibition.

Chad Scott is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersections of politics, culture, and lived experience(s). He is particularly interested in the ways social structures and institutions shape and are shaped by individual and collective action. Recent projects have focused on the electoral process as a cultural event, civic discourse and participation as they relate to boundary antagonisms of analog and digital culture, and politics of space and place. Borrowing from Walter Benjamin, this approach may be described as “The work of [socially-engaged] art in the age of re[mix and post-]production.” This line of inquiry remixes and re-contextualizes past, present, and future aspects of social, cultural, and political phenomena.

Chad is currently an Artist-in-Residence with the Gayle A. Zeiter Literacy Development Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and served as the inaugural Art Educator-in-Residence with the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in 2019.

Chad has a PhD in Sociology from Texas A&M University, an MFA in studio art from the University of Houston, where he was awarded a Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fellowship in Sculpture, an MA and BA in Political Science from California State University, Sacramento/ Stanislaus.

SETTLERS AND NOMADS

"They're All Gonna Laugh at You" Heidi Rider

October 25, 2020 by Available Space Art Projects

I have moved more than 40 times in my life. I’ve lived in seven different states, attended eleven different schools, and was home-schooled for three years. For an entire year in high school, I ate my lunch alone in a bathroom stall. Having frizzy hair, wearing hand-me-down clothing and speaking with an out of state accent didn’t make me any friends, but it sure as hell taught me how to use comedy to deflect shame and rejection.

When starting over as the perpetual new girl becomes a regular part of your life, you learn how to make it work for you. I grew up afraid that people would stare at me, or single me out as a weirdo and laugh at me. Now, in my performances, I deliberately place myself in those vulnerable and terrifying spaces and we share it together. I work almost exclusively in direct address with constant and unmistakable eye contact. No one hides. We all see each other.

I love me some losers—black teeth lady, saggy titties, ugly toupee no-chin-man, white trash granny, big butt lady, balding fat belly man. These people make me want to cry. Losers still need love; I perform them with some deep affection. And assholes still need to be called assholes. When I skewer and lambaste jerks, I make them as ugly as possible. I love making them stand accountable for themselves through my body. I let myself get wild and nasty to make people uncomfortable, laugh, or get angry. To feel something. I incorporate humor into my art, even when it isn’t funny.

In performances and in my visual work, I use the extreme comic character of the clown to channel personal and cultural anxieties. Clowns can joyfully process embarrassing feelings because they don’t experience shame. They’ll do anything for love and if they fall on their face, they just bounce back up and keep frolicking forward. Straight into the Pits of Hell, LALALA!! Through clown, I celebrate becoming the loser of my choosing.