Sunday, October 6th  7pm

$10 suggested donation

Bitch Slap! is an evening of performance and video art at Human Resources LA, by female identified and non-binary artists who confront contrived notions of femininity. In a time where didactic art seems like the only pathway to social justice, these powerful works incorporate humor to playfully explore the embodiment of being a ‘Baddass Bitch. The evening is curated by Liz Miller-Kovacs and hosted by Rochelle Fabb.

Works by:

Nao Bustamante

Rochelle Fabb

Johnny Forever Narwacaj

Dulce Soledad Ibarra

Xandra Ibarra

Sarah Johnson

Liz Miller-Kovacs (with Pony Lee Musgrave and Julia Cornell)

Micaela Tobin (White Boy Scream)

Special Guests
NAO BUSTAMANTE is an internationally known artist, originally from California; she now resides in Los Angeles. Bustamante’s precarious work encompasses performance art, video installation, visual art, filmmaking, and writing. The New York Times says, “She has a knack for using her body.” Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the New York Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sundance International Film Festival, Outfest International Film Festival, El Museo del Barrio Museum of Contemporary Art, First International Performance Biennial, Deformes in Santiago, Chile and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. Bustamante is alum of the San Francisco Art Institute, New Genres program and the Skowhegen School of Painting and Sculpture. Currently she holds the position of Associate Professor and Vice Dean of Art at the USC Roski School of Art and Design.

ROCHELLE FABB creates original group and solo performances and intimate, site-specific works incorporating installation and performance. Her works explore lust, rage, passion and power with pathos, humor and nod to pop culture. She co-founded the performance ensemble, Empire of Teeth and is a member of Mariel Carranza’s Encounter group. She has performed at LACMA, Highways, Lincoln Center, Knitting Factory, the New Genres Festival (Tulsa), Mobius (Boston), RAW Tempel (Berlin), Theatre Nogent (Marnay sur Seine, France), Ex-Teresa Int’l Festival (Mexico City), and in galleries, houses and public spaces. She was a touring member of the Rachel Rosenthal Company and Asher Hartman’s Gawdafful National Theater.

JOHHNY FOREVER NAWRACAJ is a nonbinary Polish-born performance and video artist currently based between Montreal and Los Angeles. Their work weaves surrealist narrative through the manipulation of mundane objects in fantastical space, both physical and virtual. Forever insists on the disruption of categories, building visual allegories for liminal and ever-shifting identities. They also seek to explore love, loss, and longing with a particular investment in these themes as a part of radical queer and trans cultural production.

DULCE SOLEDAD IBARRA is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, designer and non-profit arts advocate based in Los Angeles with special interests in community and identity-emphasized arts and opportunity. As a practicing artist, Ibarra discusses issues of generational guilt, intersecting communities, language, and cultural identities in videos, installations, performances, and participatory work. Looking through queer Brown/Latinx/Xicanx perspective, the work is fueled by emotional labor, persynal research and analyzation.

XANDRA IBARRA is an Oakland-based performance artist from the US/Mexico border who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom. Ibarra uses hyperbolized modes of racialization and sexualization to test the boundaries between her own body and coloniality, compulsory whiteness, and Mexicanidad. Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Broad Museum (LA, USA), Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe’s Pub (NYC), PPOW Gallery (NYC), Anderson Collection (Stanford) and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF) to name a few. She has been awarded the Art Matters Grant, NALAC Fund for the Arts, ReGen Artist Fund, and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, ArtNews and in various academic journals nationally and internationally. As a community organizer, Ibarra’s work is located within feminist immigrant, anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE!, a national feminist of color organization dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. She currently lectures within the Critical Studies program at California College of the Arts.

SARAH JOHNSON is an Los Angeles based artist working in performance, video, potography, and writing. Johnson has performed internationally in galleries, theaters, cathedrals, freeway underpasses, backyards, and otherwise. An alum of NYU in Performance Studies, her work has been featured at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada), the TBA Festival (PDX OR), and Sub Rosa Projects (Greece).

LIZ MILLER-KOVACS is a contemporary artist working in Los Angeles. Encompassing video, performance, photography and installation, Miller-Kovacs’ work is eclectic both formally and in content. Her studio practice explores the relationship between commodity, globalized society and the human condition. The conundrum of living in a time where our environment is becoming increasingly uninhabitable while society at large seems preoccupied with assimilating to meditated images has become a focal point in her work. Miller-Kovacs additionally examines the hypocrisy within her critique of the media and her own participation in the indulgent superficiality of commercial culture. Miller-Kovacs has exhibited her works and performed in major art centers and galleries around the North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. She is an Alumni of the San Francisco Art Institute where she completed her MFA in New Genres. More recently she completed a Visual Arts PhD at Sydney College of the Arts in Australia, where she was awarded both the IPRS and IPA international scholarships for the duration of her research.

MICAELA TOBIN is a soprano, sound artist, and teacher based in Los Angeles, CA who specializes in contemporary opera and experimental voice, composing under the moniker “White Boy Scream.” Within this project Micaela dissects her operatic singing style and extended vocal techniques through the use of electronics, in an attempt to undermine patriarchal constructs of her classical training and reclaim the “diva.” She has performed extensively throughout the western United States, most notably as a guest with hip-hop experimentalists clipping. during their 2017 tour in support of The Flaming Lips. Micaela’s most recent full length release, “Remains” (Crystalline Morphologies) was listed as one of the top 10 Noise/Industrial Albums of 2018 by The Wire Magazine.

Curation:
Liz Miller-Kovacs

Production:
Marcus Kuiland-Nazario

Production Manager:
Abdiel López

Special Thanks:
Human Resources, Vardui Sharakpanyan, Abdiel López