Respite Station is an incubator, archive, and experiment in community built through the collaborative writing practice and radio broadcasts by Luan Joy Sherman and sair goetz. This project aims to explore the depth and nuance of our queer and trans experiences by dissecting a wide range of quotidian topics and personal narratives, from passing and desirability politics to ventriloquism and color theory.

The closing reception marks the opening of the project into other spaces and will include ephemera from the making of this work.

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Respite Station is an incubator, archive, and experiment in community building that exists to highlight queer and trans narratives through public programming and radio broadcasts. This project aims to capture the depth and nuance of queer and trans existence by including a wide range of narratives and utilizing an online archive format to collect and honor multiple perspectives and experiences.

sair goetz writes instructions that queer problematic realities into speculative fictions. Their work seeks to leverage the weightlessness of language to complicate, manipulate, and annotate weighty matters. This speculation is inscribed back into reality through bodily performance, video, installation, and signage. sair received their MFA from the Ohio State University in 2017 and their BA in Visual and Media Studies, Arts of the Moving Image, and Documentary Studies from Duke University in 2011. In 2017-2018 sair was awarded the Dedalus Foundation post-MFA fellowship. sair has shown their work internationally and completed several residencies across the US: Open Windows, San Francisco, CA; SPACE, Portland, ME; ACRE, Stuben, WI; Little Paper Planes @ Minnesota Street Projects, San Francisco, CA; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; Weir Farm, Wilson, CT; Sedona Arts Center, Sedona, AZ (with fourfor collective); Elsewhere Museum, Greensboro, NC.

Luan Joy Sherman (b. Portland, ME 1993), is a Chicago-based trans masc artist pursuing his MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sherman is a multimedia artist interested in trans and queer bodies, masculinity, failure, and the politics of sport. He graduated from The Savannah College of Art and Design in 2015 with a BFA in Painting and Art History. He has attended residencies at The Chautauqua School of Art (2014), Black Mountain School (2016), ACRE (2017), and SPACE Gallery (2018). In February 2018, he received a National Endowment for The Arts Grant as the Artist-In-Residence at SPACE Gallery in Portland, ME and has been a faculty member at School of The Alternative in Black Mountain, NC since 2016. He is currently developing Voice Box, a Chicago-centered interactive sound project located in the back of his car. Voice Box aims to amplify marginalized voices while making sound art and oral history more accessible for queer and trans people.

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Tags: Chicago, Comfort Station Logan Square, Illinois, Logan Square, Luan Joy Sherman, Respite Station, Sair Goetz