DAY 1 \\ EVENTS OFF THE BLUE LINE
Friday, February 3 + Saturday, February 4
Avondale + North Logan Square • South Logan Square + Humboldt Park • Wicker Park
Download the Guide to February 3-4 events // use our 2017 mobile app to navigate events
ETIQUETTE
All 2nd Floor Rear events are artist-organized and artist-run. Artists may request cash donations at their events. We encourage you to honor creative labor by making a contribution at every 2nd Floor Rear event you attend. All donations go directly to the organizing artists.
Oppressive or harmful behavior is not welcome at 2nd Floor Rear events. Oppressive behavior includes any action that perpetuates racism, misogyny, heterosexism, transphobia, and other systemic oppressions through antagonism, silencing, intimidation, or coercion. Harmful behavior includes harassment, violence, and violation of consent. (See feministactionsupportnetwork.tumblr.com/saferspaces)
*All event descriptions written by the organizing artists with editorial support from 2FR staff
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3
FIRDAY NIGHT OPENING CEREMONY
Pond Hole Presents: an All-American Family Meal
Betsy Zacsek + Juneer Kibria
Feast + Happening + Participatory Performance \\ Pond Hole Gallery, 2925 N. Ridgeway Ave. \\Supper 6:30-8:30 PM; Participatory Performance 8:30-10:00 PM
POND HOLE PRESENTS: An All American Family Meal prepared in the fashion of our usual dinner parties but open to the whole 2nd Floor Rear family. Guests are encouraged to bring a dish to pass, a drink to share, a cash donation to our piggy bank, or supply some good, old‐fashioned dish duty. The dinner party will be a genuine family gathering with fluxus style games, creative exchanges and other nonsense sprinkled in here and there. Most importantly, as with all family gatherings, we anticipate and have scheduled a complete breakdown of all social courtesy. We’ll end our meal by collectively heading out to the yard to take turns standing on a literal soap box and screaming our grievances (about anything and everything) into the pond hole while the rest of the group looks on.
facebook.com/POND-HOLE-Gallery
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SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4
AVONDALE + NORTH LOGAN SQUARE
An Altar to a Chosen Family
Chiara Galimberti
Interactive Installation \\ Corner, 2912 N. Milwaukee Ave., Storefront \\ Open gallery hours: 12:00-4:00 PM; Reception: 4:00-6:00 PM
Subversive communities and identities are often formed and supported by bonds found outside of blood families. An Altar to Chosen Family is a collaborative public installation that attempts to imagine family trees that contain the tools we need to create the world we want, and to dismantle what we have inherited that no longer serves us. I will build an altar to thinkers, artists, writers, social justice activists and musicians that are part of my chosen family tree and invite people to add to the altar by bringing mementos and images of the people that have guided them and sustained them.
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Again and again
Hanna M. Owens + Kelly Thomas
Exhibition + Curated Performances \\ Hairpin Arts Center, 2810 N. Milwaukee Ave. \\ Open gallery hours: 1:00-6:00 PM; Reception + performances: 6:00-10:00 PM
Chicago-based artist Hanna M. Owens and Kelly Thomas, an LA-based writer, present Again and again, an iteration of objects, writings and readings embodying a collaboration between the friends since they met while teaching at a summer camp for teens in 2012.
Again and again, we swap body and heart wisdom. These works explore the evolving iterations of queer friendship and undefined complexities of relationships between women, our dynamics reinvented throughout time. What is girl-on-girl in this war on sexual health?
On the evening of February 4, Owens will perform ASMR therapy on willing participants as a durational performance. ASMR therapy, usually delivered via internet video, is a ritual that many utilize to aid with anxiety, insomnia, and relaxation. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR, is the tingly, soothing sensation you may feel in your head, scalp, neck or shoulders when triggered by certain audio and/or visual cues, such as watching someone clean windows or hearing ice tinker in your glass. Often we feel this when getting a haircut or when someone whispers in our ear. You may be surprised which triggers work on you; just writing this puts me in the zone.
Additionally on February 4, the artists offer an evening of storytelling through objects to compliment the installation, including performances by Kelly Thomas and Chicago-based artist Holly Chernobyl. The performed object serves as a vessel for occurrences with which we can all empathize.
hannamowens.com | Kelly Thomas
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Flesh Deity
Mariel Harari
Interactive Performance + Installation \\ Hairpin Arts Center, 2810 N. Milwaukee Ave. \\ Open gallery hours: 1:00-6:00 PM; Reception + performance: 6:00-10:00 PM
Flesh Deity is a ceremony dedicated to the fictional flesh deity. Visitors are invited to participate with no prior knowledge of who the flesh deity is or what she stands for. Upon entering the space, each visitor is given a necklace. They move around the bright blue floors, between patches of grass. They see visceral red decorations on the walls. They can see that the necklace they wear is made of the same material as the deity, and the grass, and the wall pieces. In the center of the room the flesh deity appears to be a stationary blob, made of shiny vinyl stuffed with yarn, until they approach it, and it moves. Flesh Deity aims to explore how the imposed connection to one’s environment and fellow visitors, created by the context of ritual, affects their experience.
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STRANGERS COWBOYS
Emily Sasmor curated by Danny Floyd
Looping Video Installation + Screening \\ Hairpin Arts Center, 2810 N. Milwaukee Ave. \\ Open gallery hours: 1:00-6:00 PM; Reception + screenings: 6:00-10:00 PM
STRANGER chops up COWBOY in the woods. STRANGERS COWBOYS is a collection of COWBOY’s components. Set together they formed into the shape of an operatic visual album. STRANGER doesn’t understand why. STRANGER isn’t “like” this.
cargocollective.com/emilysasmor | dannyfloyd.com
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Channeling the Spirit of Human Future
Christopher Allman
Installation + Performance \\ Hairpin Arts Center, 2810 N. Milwaukee Ave. \\ Open gallery hours: 1:00-6:00 PM; Reception + performances: 6:00-10:00 PM
Dressed in shamanic costume, facilitated by masked dancers and drummers, we will perform a ritual meant to channel future spirits. Audience members will be invited (though not obliged) to participate in the spirit channeling. Those who wish may also engage with peripheral ritual objects that will exist as part of the surrounding altar piece.
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A Moises Imbatchi Experience
Joshua M. McCormick
Performance \\ Plaza, 2821 N. Milwaukee Ave. \\ Begins 5:00 PM
Where human feet have never trod,
Where human eyes have never seen.
I’ll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you.
—Sun Ra, liner notes to “Monorails and Satellites”
My perspective as an artist has been shaped by cultural estrangement. This performance is part of a larger attempt to bridge a connection to my roots, however futile that may be. I remember asking my mother, when I was a small child, ‘Am I Chinese? Am I Black? Am I Mexican? Then what am I?’
A Moises Imbatchi Experience fuses my personal art practice and musicianship, developed here in the United States, with my personal myth of culture and heritage that began as an adopted Colombian child raised in Ohio.
I am not attempting to perform my Colombian identity and what little I know about where I was born. Instead, I am embodying an alternate persona that has always existed in my imagination and is a point of reference as I perform day-to-day social interactions as a transcultural person of color.
I am inspired by the Chicago musician Sun Ra and saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk. This work is still evolving, as are my craftspersonship and musicianship.
Instruments and costume are all made by Joshua with influence from Moises. Each object has a spiritual significance and purpose for ritual usage.
Sacred art objects are meant to be utilized by and in front of an audience and deemed inactive unless it performs its duty in front of the community.
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The Transition
Ann Kreitman + Shaina Schrooten
Roaming Performance (1st Edition) \\ Departs from Corner \\ Begins 5:00 PM
The Transition is a roaming event created by Ann Kreitman and Shaina Schrooten. Leading festival-goers from venue to venue, twenty women break bread and keen, engaging in a ritual of grief for our changing world. Historically, keening consists of a mass of women wailing, vocalizing the agony of the transition between life and death. Keening women are thought to not belong to either realm but to the in-between space. We occupy the transition space by creating an active processional for 2nd Floor Rear.
annkreitman.com | shainaschrooten.com
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OUT: Utilizing Craft to Transform Queer Labor into Objects of Power to Survive, Thrive and Other-Throw
Katie Vota + Ariel Gentalen
Craft Gathering \\ Crown Liquors, 2821 N. Milwaukee Ave. \\ 5:00-9:00 PM
Gathering in the face of adversity has become suddenly more pertinent than ever. Not only gathering for the purpose of social justice, but to be around others that share your views and your struggles in an arena of self-care. In shaping this event, we ask ourselves: how do we embody meaningful art/life practices? Ritual is not just about ceremony, but about actions repeated with hope. Through our event, we seek to give space and representation to a myriad of people of complex identities who unite knowing they’re stronger, fiercer and more queenly together.
With this togetherness, we pair the word “craft,” which in our understanding is a term given importance (and scorn) by its association with queer and female labor. We want to dwell on the ways queer persons craft themselves, the rituals of identity creation that go on before the party, the putting-on of a personae, and the societal dangers that stop many of us from participation in these rituals. We want people to attend both as they are and as they want to be, going through their going-out rituals as they see fit.
Crafts to look out for: buttons/queer achievement badges
With thanks to the Waste Shed for their donation.
katievota.com | twitter.com/mxarielg
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Genuflexion
Creamy Gallery
Multimedia Exhibition \\ Creamy Gallery, 2448 N. Spaulding Ave., Apt. #2 \\ 5:00-9:00 PM
Genuflexion is a group exhibition featuring the work of Shawne Michaelin Holloway, Jennifer Chan, Cat Bleumke, Analu Maria Rodriguez, Maya Ben David, and Iryne Roh. Through femme authored works that navigate the material, spiritual and digital, the artists of Genuflexion examine the body as a site for interrogation, exultation and transformation. The exhibition is curated by Paul Carlo Esposito for Creamy Gallery.
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SOUTH LOGAN SQUARE + NORTH HUMBOLDT PARK
Por la Mañana: a Community Cafe
Fontaine Capel
Participatory Performance + Installation \\ Hume, 3242 W. Armitage Ave. \\ 10:00 AM-2:00 PM
The preparation of cafecitos—diminutive cups of stovetop espresso— is a time-honored Cuban ritual. This screwing, unscrewing, piling, scooping, and stirring is the first action of the day, and is performed as an act of familial love.
In Por La Mañana: a Community Café, Cuban-American artist Fontaine Capel will transform her storefront gallery—Hume Chicago—into a domestic space. The installation borrows visual elements from her grandparents’ Brooklyn apartment which, after nearly fifty years of her family’s continuous residence, is now being converted into luxury apartments.
Neighbors in rapidly gentrifying Logan Square will be welcomed into the space with bilingual signage, hot cafecitos, and the opportunity to sit around the kitchen table and talk with their neighbors.
fontainecapel.com | humechicago.org
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Ritual Through Diaspora
JCSpaceRadio
Mobile Participatory Installation (1st Edition) \\ Hume, 3242 W. Armitage Ave. \\ Doors: 2:00 PM; Performance: 3:00-4:00 PM
JCSpaceRadio is a mobile, immersive, durational installation that addresses the ongoing inhabitation of transmission frequencies. Our contemporary landscape is inundated with a constant barrage of digital frequencies. Broadcasts from JCSpaceRadio are transmissions of tones attuned to natural bodily frequencies, supplementing depleted alpha, beta, delta, and theta wave resources.
Facilitated by Christine Shallenberg in Chicago and Jenn Cooper in Thailand, “Ritual Through Diaspora” is a physical exploration of resonances of tranquility. Traveling trunks will expand to create a space for an intimate ritual gathering that engages with bodies scattered from their original homelands. A live radio broadcast will accompany the Chicago presentation and may be accessed by individuals in the vicinity. Tonal broadcasts will be body-based and will focus on the frequencies of organs.
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Les Chanteuses Du Rien
The Trickster Quartet
(Sara Zalek, Elaine Lemieux, Hanna Brock + Here)
Picnic + Opera \\ 3642 W. Dickens Ave. \\ 4:00-7:00 PM
A picnic with four tricksters on the edge of a dig into the unknown. The stage moves in and around this home to immerse you in the Opera. These creatures attempt to access centuries of conditioning, to purposefully reroute some energetic phlegm, to create a space for a spontaneous healing by putting love into water, into food, into you. There will be vocal drones in the key of E, made and passed. Others in the key of F, made and passed. What rises up out of this drone will be made in the moment, and the energy resonating by all who are present.
The Trickster Quartet consists of Sara Zalek, Elaine Lemieux, Hanna Brock and Here. Our process of making includes improvisational sound and movement scores, Butoh and vocal training techniques, live video feed, glitch art, and open honest reflection. Each time we meet, we embark on journeys into our personal history and memory, creating sounds and movement in response to one another. Over time, we have discovered the reverberations of joy in these meetings. By doing this in your presence, we wish to give you to the space to access to your own resonance and dissonance. Over and over we want to surprise you, to devastate you, to disarm you. Ultimately we want to uplift your spirit.
saratonin.com | butohchicago.com
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Daily Routine Fest
Pinky Swear
Music + Performance + Other \\ Pinky Swear* \\ 4:00-8:00 PM
Daily Routine is a Saturday afternoon mini-fest of performances, bands and readings at the DIY house venue Pinky Swear. It aims to create a large-scale immersive environment of an ordinary day.
*Message pinkyswearemail@gmail.com for address
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You Can Use My Toothbrush
COLLABO
(Frances Dorenbaum + Claire Frost)
A Housewarming Exhibition \\ 1930 N. Fairfield Ave., #1R \\ 4:00-8:00 PM
As a person nestles into a living space, they develop and perform rituals that allow them to feel settled and authentic in their being. Some habits invite the shedding of outer layers and inspire moments of joyful solitude or release, while others may provoke a regression into patterns that are embarrassing, secret, or subconscious. The privacy of these intimate spaces frees one to perform a variety of personal and specific behaviors. However, our rituals shift as we invite others into our domestic spaces, and new patterns are formed. These shared rituals embody the risk we take in welcoming someone else in and the warmth we emit by adapting to another being. Despite initial awkward moments, it is the creation of new rituals that ultimately strengthens bonds and fosters relationships with both the space and those in it.
COLLABO would like to invite you to join us in warming our home, and in doing so, help us to build new rituals as we experience the work of Liz McCarthy, Jaclyn Mednicov, George Olken, Erika Raberg, and Willy Smart.
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(s)E(a)SCAPE
Anna Liza De Leon Evangelista + Lorén Navidad Ibach
Participatory Performance + Installation \\ IN HOUSE, 3520 W. Armitage Ave. \\ Open gallery hours: 5:00-7:00 PM; Reception + performance: 7:00-9:00 PM
(s)E(a)SCAPE is an active multi-media installation that invites viewers to partake in an evening of karaoke with the artists. Evangelista’s ceramic pieces shaped like oceanic coral wrapped with Ibach’s woven textiles scatter and fill the room acting as the artists’ housewares that represent their travels and exchanges with one another as well as a critique on souvenirs manufactured through tourism, trade, and imperialism. Ibach’s large sculpture constructed of fabric resembling the undulating shape of a rice terrace mountain, encases and manipulates the white walls of the gallery. In the center is a couch and coffee table that holds a karaoke machine with microphones and a songbook. On the wall is a projection of the music’s lyrics and visuals. Viewers are able to select from the songbook and choose what to sing. Ibach and Evangelista’s karaoke visuals will appear in the background of the karaoke lyrics. This includes images of women in the Philippines post Spanish colonization lounging in traditional formalwear, video footage of Filipinx Youtube stars Charice Pempengco and Arnel Pineda singing, as well as with images of the artists displaced and collaged in different travel destinations. During the Ritual event, Ibach and Evangelista will be wearing garments they made, basketball jerseys with the word “Nanay” on the front, a Tagalog word that translates to mother. The gallery becomes a home that the two artists have occupied and made their own through the use of objects and belongings. They invite the community into this made up domestic world to transport themselves somewhere else through song. The loud sound of others’ voices layered on top of popular music arrangements will amplify and fill the space and echo and transcend into the street and neighborhood. While the artists use karaoke as a way to celebrate camaraderie and togetherness through American popular song, audiences must digest the complexities within the images displayed.
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On Returning
Jeremiah + Rosa
Residency + Multimedia Exhibition + Gathering \\ 2753 W. Francis Pl. \\ 8:00 PM-12:00 AM
On Returning is an inquiry, celebration, and mourning of the seduction and impossibility of returning to where we once were.
Whether engaging in a ritual action or visiting a place where we once lived, we can never return to our past selves, past places, past lives. Often our memory of a place or time is imbued with myth, or that place is completely different that what we left behind, or we have changed and don’t fit the same way we did before. We can’t go home again; we can’t sit in the same river twice; we can’t make America great again. The desire to return is an inevitable failure.
Featuring a collection of artists once based in Chicago but now living elsewhere, On Returning explores the themes of reunion, nostalgia, diaspora, liminality, hindsight and home. Participating artists will create the featured work during a one‐week in‐house residency taking place before the 2nd Floor Rear event. The event itself will feature video screenings, performances, visual artworks, a backyard bonfire, snacks, candles and flowers.
jeremiahjones.com | rosagaia.com
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WICKER PARK
Ritual Through Diaspora
JCSpaceRadio
Mobile Participatory Installation (2nd Edition) \\ Tritriangle, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave. 3rd Floor \\ Doors: 5:30 PM; Performance: 6:00-7:00 PM
JCSpaceRadio is a mobile, immersive, durational installation that addresses the ongoing inhabitation of transmission frequencies. Our contemporary landscape is inundated with a constant barrage of digital frequencies. Broadcasts from JCSpaceRadio are transmissions of tones attuned to natural bodily frequencies, supplementing depleted alpha, beta, delta, and theta wave resources.
Facilitated by Christine Shallenberg in Chicago and Jenn Cooper in Thailand, “Ritual Through Diaspora” is a physical exploration of resonances of tranquility. Traveling trunks will expand to create a space for an intimate ritual gathering that engages with bodies scattered from their original homelands. A live radio broadcast will accompany the Chicago presentation and may be accessed by individuals in the vicinity. Tonal broadcasts will be body-based and will focus on the frequencies of organs.
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An Interview
Ira S. Murfin
with Heather McShane + Nathanael Lee Jones
Performance \\ Tritriangle, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave. 3rd Floor \\ 7:30-9:30 PM; Performance begins promptly at 7:30 PM
An Interview is a single, linear performance, consisting of an indeterminate number of interlocking one-hour segments, each made up of the performed transcript of a prior interview and a new extemporaneous interview between two participants — the performer who conducted the interview in the previous segment and a new performer, who interviews the returning performer during the second half of the performance. An Interview commenced with a unique half hour segment presented at Tritriangle on 14 October 2016 in which Ira S. Murfin, the artist instigating the work, was interviewed by a second performer, Heather McShane, for 30 minutes. In this, the first full one-hour segment, Murfin will not appear as a performer. Instead McShane will be joined by a new performer, Nathanael Lee Jones. McShane and Jones will sit across a table from one another and read, verbatim, the transcribed text of the earlier interview. Once the transcript has been read, Jones will interview McShane for one half hour on any subject(s) of his choosing. This segment of An Interview will be preceded by McShane presenting her own work, and it will be followed by Jones’s Three Long Lists with Kate R Morris, Jess Saldana, and Beth McDonald.
tritriangle.net
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The MorphoTransverse Method
Annie Kielman + Josh Patterson
InterACTIVE Performance \\ Tritriangle, 1550 N. Milwaukee Ave. 3rd Floor \\ 9:30 PM-12:30 AM, with performances at 10 PM, 11 PM, and 12 AM
DECIDE. COMMIT. THRIVE. The MorphoTransverse Method® updates ancient health practices for the modern fitness world—all you need to do is be PRESENT. Together, we’ll turn your goals into results, and uncover your level of happiness and stability so that you can reach a superior state of existence.
Discover your heightened self as we teach you to unify your spirit and body, allowing them to evolve beyond earthly boundaries.
Join us for your EXCLUSIVE introductory Trial Experience of
The MorphoTransverse Method®
30-minute example sessions will be held at 10pm, 11pm, and Midnight. Please arrive 5 minutes early if you plan to participate.
Please join Annie Kielman and Josh Patterson as they explore the intersection between esoteric fitness and esoteric spiritualism. This event will include instructional literature as well as provide a guided experience in both physical and cognitive amoral exercises. The energy of the space will echo the condensed frenzy of bodies found in group fitness classes, with the instructor playing cult leader. Keeping exertion levels to a minimum, the combination of choreographed movements, designed sound accompaniment, and shouts from a seductively energetic leader will mimic a spiritual drunk, spiked with coke: a sort of post-modern speedball. The performance will serve as a playful safe-space for experiencing that transcendence naively. Upon surrender the viewer has the opportunity to analyze the feeling of relinquishing autonomy to become a part of a larger healing herd.
2nd Floor Rear 