What you love

A participatory queer art project

This archive of contemporary LGBTQ+ love stories includes over 250 responses that range from testimony written onsite during gallery installations to donated collections of love letters. 

What You Love was developed and exhibited in residency with The Feminist Center for Creative Work at The Huntington in Los Angeles as a part of the group show Collaborations in 2017.

“Peter, Peter…”

Short narrative film: 16mm, color, sync-sound, 6:33 minutes

A dark retelling of the children’s rhyme “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater.” Visually modelled on 8mm movies shot by my grandmother, which became the basis for, Trace Decay. 

Screened at: AugustArt at Raw Space Studios, NY, NY; LadyfestEast, NY, NY; Wilmington Independent Film Festival, Wilmington, DE; Coney Island Short Film Festival, Brooklyn, NY; Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival, Rehoboth, DE; LadyfestOhio, Columbus, OH; Fancy Pants Cinema Open Mic Night at NorthThird Bar, Philadelphia, PA.

Watch an excerpt on artfem.tv

Read about this project in my essay “This Precarious Authorship: Some Notes on Home Movies, Homemaking, and Alternative Genealogies,” in Experiments in She-ness: Women and Undependent and Cinema, ed. Bryan Konefsky.

Trace decay

Trace Decay, live performance, DV/8mm/VHS, color, sound, 60 minutes, 2009.

A live collaborative experiment with choreographer Sasha Welsh, composer J Why and performers Laurie Berg, Cindy Chung Camins, and Cynthia St. Clair.  Trace Decay was developed through an intense improvisational process between the artists-performers and their ‘home media’ ranging from 8mm films shot in the 1940’s to VHS and audio-cassette.  These movement-based performances explored processes of memory (both cultural and personal) and the experience of the passage of time. 

The development of Trace Decay was supported by The Swarthmore Project, a residency program for choreographers and dancers sponsored by Swarthmore College in Swarthmore PA.  Presented at Triskelion Arts, Brooklyn, NY; and Window on the Work at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.  Excerpts have been shown at RAW Material at Dance New Amsterdam, Body Blend at Dixon Place, Movement Research’s Open Performance at Dance Theatre Workshop; and Movement Media’s Kinetic Cinema.

Watch an excerpt on artfem.tv

Read about this project in my essay “This Precarious Authorship: Some Notes on Home Movies, Homemaking, and Alternative Genealogies,” in Experiments in She-ness: Women and Undependent and Cinema, ed. Bryan Konefsky.

The Women in the director’s chair oral history project archive

Women in the Director’s Chair Oral History Project The WDC Oral History Project includes seventy-eight student produced oral history projects documenting female filmmakers from Nora Ephron (Julie & Julia) and Ava DuVernay (Selma) to Emily Squires (Sesame Street) and Demetria Royals (Conjure Woman).  Founded with Louise Tiranoff at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.

Work in progress

16mm/digital-8, color, sound, 68 minutes

A stuttering, OCD, bi-sexual film that will bore your pants off.  This one is for loving yourself. This one is for no shame. This one is ad-hoc and public. Other people have been as lonely, as crazy, as desperate and pathetic as you. Other people want to be touched and hate waiting. A film for everyone who just can’t move on until they’ve finished what they started:  “work-in-progress” turns fictional, narrative, footage from an unrealized film – and documentary scenes of that film’s making – into a retrospective and splintered coming-of-age story.  A tale of death-at-first-site, it is a film about waiting, wanting, and the inexplicable rhythms of change.

S.u.b.m.i.s.s.i.o.n Sublimation

Transforming application anxiety into creative community

S.u.b.m.i.s.s.i.o.n Sublimation is a monthly co-work group hosted by Kiki Loveday and Marybeth Chew that aims to support womxn artists and build feminist and queer creative community in Baltimore. We invite you to gather with us for a s.u.b.m.i.s.s.i.o.n sublimation session. We will spend 2-4 hours submitting our work to galleries, journals, festivals, jobs, etc. Bring your laptop and the application you’re working on. At the beginning of the session we will introduce ourselves and set our goals for the day, when someone submits an application we will cheer. We also make space for giving/getting feedback and supportive listening.

We live the opposite

A site-specific performance at “An Evening Among the Roses,” The Huntington’s annual celebration of the LGBT+ community, 3hrs

A series of live micro-performances using structured improvisations that engage the history of the ancient lyric poet Sappho in the visual and performing arts, especially the “living statues” and “poses”of early cinema. Actresses from Sarah Bernhardt to Greta Garbo have taken on the role of Sappho. Performers Cindy Chung Camins, Jheanelle Garriques, Gina Young, and Jess Imme re-interpret the iconic figure of Sappho in a cataclysmic moment of uncertainty and backlash against queer civil rights.

something made of nothing / Traffic in kisses

Short experimental video: dv, collected audio, found footage, 7 minutes. In collaboration with film scholar Susan Potter, forthcoming in the “Exquisite Historiography” dossier in Framework.

Silent cinema’s most famous smooches collide with more obscure osculations in Traffic in Kisses, an experimental remediation of the earliest kissing films (1896-1905). Produced through a back-and-forth exchange between award-winning scholar Susan Potter and artist-scholar Kiki Loveday, the video includes archival films newly digitised by the Library of Congress for the project. Inspired by queer collage films such as The Meeting of Two Queens (Cecilia Barriga, US, 1991), Nitrate Kisses (Barbara Hammer, US, 1992), Badass Supermama (Etang Inyang, 1996) and Grosse Fuge (William Comstock, US, 1998), Traffic in Kisses offers a queer perspective on the aesthetic, social and disciplinary functions of kissing films in the history of early cinema.