Friday, February 9^th, 6pm – 10pm
Performances: 8pm – 10pm
Featuring: Jules Chimes Gårder and Nat Decker, Star Feliz and Cielo Saucedo, thai Lu, Life Em Stebbins and Jazmin Romero

Gallery Hours: Saturday, February 10^th and Sunday, February 11^th,  12 – 6 pm

Free admission; donations will be split between Sensi Skins and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

PLEASE NOTE: Masks are required for the evening of performances to protect our immunocompromised community members. Free masks will be provided. HR is physically accessible with a small ramped entrance and ADA compliant bathroom. The event will be live-streamed. Auto captions will be provided in the space and on the live-stream. A visual description of the installation will be available during open hours. Please reach out to jules.c.garder@gmail.com for additional access requests.  

Posturing Collapse is a two-person exhibition featuring works by Jules Chimes Gårder and Nat Decker. The duo will present a collaborative performance and installation of sculpture and video which measures the intersections (and differences) of their histories with grief, disability, and sexuality. The opening will include performances by Star Feliz and Cielo Saucedo, thai Lu, Life Em Stebbins, and Jazmin Romero.

Jules Chimes Gårder is obsessed with their dead mom. Nat Decker is a fall risk toting the weight of abjection. Together they collapse and defy gravity in moments of recognition. Tendrils reach for stable ground, exploring the spaciousness of absence. They count distances from shock, perpetually reconstituting themselves. They crawl on uneven terrain, defining new functional heights. They rest still, knowing they are changing. Pressure delivers resistance.

Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago born Los Angeles based artist interpreting the intimacies of queer and disabled experience as provocation toward collective care and liberation. Bridging digital and physical mediums, they leverage technology as a form of access, seeking the integration of values into tools and processes. With Cielo Saucedo and Olivia Dreisinger, Nat is building Cripping_CG – a community archive researching and documenting the intersection of disability culture and computer graphics. Nat is also an access worker, consulting on accessibility for various arts organizations. They were a 2023 Processing Foundation Fellow and are a current member of NEW INC. In June 2022 they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design/Media Arts and Disability Studies.

Jules Chimes Gårder (b.1987) (they/she) is a Los Angeles based artist indebted to the patterns of demise and reconstruction that are prompted by loss and grief. They primarily create sculptures and videos. Much of their work engages longitudinal experiences of mourning through collaborations with their mother Eva Chimes (posthumously). They will soon hold a BA in Art from UCLA.

Cielo Saucedo is an access worker and artist based in Los Angeles. Their work focuses on the dispersal of ableism through cultural economies. They work to dissolve the curative aspirations of technology. Their work encompasses computer generated imagery, sculpture and virtual reality. They received their BFA from School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and are currently an MFA candidate at UCLA. 

Star Feliz is a Dominican-American installation artist originally from New York, NY currently based in Los Angeles, CA. Building upon their ancestral Afro-Taino lineage of multi-dimensional healing — Feliz employs sound, sculpture, film, earthworks, and techniques of concealment, language, and mapping to transverse the psychic legacy of everyday resistance and world-making. Under the moniker of Priests they create experimental devotional music. They have exhibited, performed, and presented commissions nationally and internationally.

thai Lu is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and community organizer centering their practice on the social, cultural, and physical effects of chronic illness. As a chronically ill, disabled, neurodivergent, and gender-divergent first generation American from a family of Vietnamese refugees, thai works at the intersections of Western bio-politics, Southeast Asian diaspora, post-war intergenerational suffering, relational ecologies of interdependence, and the concept of metamorphosis.

Life Em Stebbins is a poet and geologist living in Humboldt County, California. As a graduate student at Cal Poly Humboldt, Life studies mud to reconstruct glaciation history and paleoclimate patterns in the Klamath Mountains. Her poems focus on dry earth, wet dirt, and the sacrament of mud. Life reads poems across the country and digs holes throughout the Intermountain West.

Jazmin Romero is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Her work explores memory, family, migration, and labor through performance, sound, music and visual art. Romero’s work is interested in understanding patterns of dispossession and displacement in her personal and familial history. Through experimental modes of storytelling, she shares her experiences in performances, video, and sculptural installations that center her resilient origins and create space for personal and collective meditation.