At this Friday’s Elastro series Ále Campos presents a second iteration of a collaborative, live audio/visual performance project titled onto a skin, highly reflective. This iteration’s collaborators include Bun Stout, Magnus, and Will Mitchell. onto a skin, highly reflective is an abstraction or rather a refraction of drag; it possesses a desire to free the drag persona from any one singular articulation. It muses over the multitudes of a projected psyche, the fluid range of emotional states experienced creating versions of the self, seeing oneself through the eyes of others, as well as the care inherent in holding and witnessing each other as queer agents. Performed in green screen suits, the performance incorporates a live stream of visually mediated bodies both in space but also video. This iteration will be set to a score of live sound by Will Mitchell and samples of original text written by me. ​ This project’s first iteration was created for and performed at SITE/less and was crafted with the format of the SITE/less’ stage in mind. This iteration will adapt to and harness Elastic’s 16 channel CLEAT system to bolster the poetics inherent in this project.

‘a skin highly reflective, a surface with sharpened edge’ ‘a muse is a muse, is a muse, my muse, for us, for my my muse, only for you, for us, for them, a muse over muse’

Joining the evening will be performances from Ruby Que and Claire Staples x Hunter Whitaker-Morrow aka ASTROMETRICS. The project explores the utopian futurities and dystopian presents of science fiction through dual desktop projections, synthesizers, and spoken word. Que will be premiering a new work “Touch” – using four projectors and layers of image-making techniques, this expanded cinema performance emphasizes touch as a form of communication to ask pertinent questions about connection, intimacy, and labor. How can we learn to hold each other better in a world that is increasingly divided?

$15 / $10 w/ Student ID – Tickets Available at the Door

Artist Bios

Ále Campos (b. 1994, Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist and performance maker whose elastic studio practice is anchored in the history and current vernacular of drag and their persona, ‘Celeste’. They generate live performance works that are often rhapsodic in nature and mediated by technology, often involving or unfolding into the mediums of sculpture, sound, text, video and installation. Drag is the lens through which they consider performance making: they consider the stage and its borders, the malleability of the gaze, how to de/construct an image, the various states of in/visibility and how to handle time. Playing with optics, the gaze and the boundaries between audience and the performing-body, allows them to explore the varying scales of vulnerability.

Claire Fleming is a queer multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of somatics, sound, politics, and new media. They are one half of the tekno duo 404 NOT FOUND and a long term member of a network of DIY underground creative communities in the United States, in which care and organizing are an important part of their practice. They currently work and reside in Chicago, Illinois, where they are a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Hunter Whitaker-Morrow is an artist who works in modes of audio-visual performance, video installation, and experimental documentary. Informed by his academic background in sociology & film theory in concert with a breadth of experience working in the television industry, Whitaker-Morrow investigates the physical, technological, social, and political dimensions of audio-visual experience with a particular focus on Black experience within the context of the United States.

Ruby Que is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus on site-specific intervention. In their work they open portals and create hauntings. Many projects grapple with absence; with video, sculpture, and performance, they attempt to give shape to what lies within and beyond the perceived void. Drawing on their lived experience as a queer, itinerant immigrant, they meditate on yearning and find home in transit. They believe in the power of collective myth-making, often engaging collaborators and viewers as co-conspirators towards liberation.

Official Website

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Tags: Ále Campos, ASTROMETRICS, Chicago, Claire Fleming, Elastic Arts, Elastro Series, Elastro: 'Contact' Featuring Ále Campos, Hunter Whitaker-Morrow, Logan Square, Ruby Que, Ruby Que and ASTROMETRICS