Wednesday, December 4, 4-7PM: Jenell Del Cid

Saturday, December 7, 10AM-6PM: Liar (Controlled Burn), Paul Donald

Monday, December 9, 4-7PM: Ballerina Boy Toy, Zeus Fondanarosa

Thursday, December 12, 9AM-Sunset: Mary W.D. Graham

Saturday, December 14, 1PM: Quinn Ray Keck

Sunday, December 15, 4PM-6PM: Contemplative Thought Box, Hannah Fhaye Oliver

Sunday, December 29, 5PM: The Tail, Selby Sohn

Tuesday, December 31, 8PM: Something happened: I touched down in time to go back up, MILO

DETAILS:

Wednesday, 12/4, 4-7PM

Jenell Del Cid

Jenell Del Cid is a San Francisco based performance artist, photographer, puppeteer and Tarot guru. Her work predominantly examines our human self-obsession in the social media epoch as well as myth-making and identity creation as a response to trauma. She portrays surrealist selfie dream worlds in order to investigate the intersection of attraction and narcissism, identity and the illusion of intimacy in social media. 

Interested in the feminine identity, and the role of technology in society, her fairy tale influenced performance art comes together to explore the interplay between femininity/pop culture and social systems that affect modern connected/constructed identity. Humor, pop songs, elaborate costumes and contemporary dance, are her tools in deconstructing stereotypical female representations. I expose, in her live performance and photography, the practice of representation itself, and challenge her audience to question its own attraction and repulsion.

Liar (Controlled Burn), Paul Donald

Paul Donald was born and raised in New Zealand before attending the University of Sydney, Australia, where he earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree in painting. After living for several years in Manchester, UK, and then Montreal, Canada, he has settled in Los Angeles. He has worked broadly across painting, sculpture, video, and performance, exhibiting and performing in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Canada, and the USA.

His current works enact a self-demolition by way of construction—construction performances/performances with construction. He makes to break—chipping away at structures of whiteness, masculinity, and colonial subjectivity, one wooden object at a time. He teaches studio art at the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California.

Ballerina Boy Toy, Zeus Fondanarosa

Z. Fondanarosa is a multimedia interdisciplinary artist whose work includes (but not limited to) painting, fiber, performance, film, and writing. Through colorfully macabre surrealism, he explores the intersectionality of disability, queerness, and his Hellenic faith. His work seeks to better understand the interactions of identity and forced politicization of the natural body. Most of his work packs in subtle symbolism to visually tell a story of the ways the body can betray when perceived, elevating the loss of control through beauty.

Z. Fondanarosa received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago(2020). His work has been shown in several galleries throughout San Francisco, CA(2022-2024) and Chicago, IL(2018-20). His film “Ego Death” originally screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL (2020) and co-headlined the Mulligan Film Fest, Aurora, IL(2024). His work has been published locally (Fantasy Mag, San Francisco, CA(2024) and internationally (Semioculus, Tartu, Estonia(2023). Z is currently based in Oakland, CA. 

Mary W.D. Graham

Mary W.D. Graham is a Philadelphia born, San Francisco based interdisciplinary artist. Her work in painting, sculpture and performance studies the notion of “the ancestors” as a conceptual medium through which we might gain historical, interpersonal, and introspective insight.

Graham’s performance work is rooted in her classical and jazz training she received as a vocalist. Serenade is a series of spontaneous, improvised vocal performances, the first iteration occurring in 2020 during the first weeks of the COVID-19 lock-down. Graham walked through North Beach, Chinatown and Telegraph Hill “serenading” her neighbors in order to foster a shared experience of beauty during an uncertain time. The practice continues today and is ever-evolving— fundamentally an exploration into the medium of song as a tool for “calling” both inward and outward. Utilizing the principals of spontaneity and improvisation, Graham has performed in collaboration with artist Jasmine Mengjiao Zhang for their vocal project Masmine at Dead End Vintage, and the Peacock Lounge in San Francisco. Graham has also been invited to perform as a part of Zekarias Musele Thompson’s Togetherness Ensemble at Grey Area in San Francisco, and at the First Presbyterian Church in Oakland for Processional.

We are who we remember, Quinn Ray Keck

One way to destroy the grid is to change what the grid is made of.  To reveal the grid the system does not want us to see.  Instead of abstract lines marching to an impossible infinite growth, the grid could be made of tethers to people, narratives, ideas.  The ones who came before us, the ones with us now,  and the ones who will come after us.  In the words of Jose Ortega, “I am I and my circumstance; and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself.”   There is no I  in  the vacuum of space, there is no me without the people next to me, before me and after me.   We are artists with our attention.   We create elsewhere within here. 

No one’s death, not even the planet’s, is a foregone conclusion – the future is not yet written.   To escape the neoliberal movie with no story, we must write our own.   We are the created and the creators, spinning new ontologies from the frameworks handed to us into new  realities with every idea. 

Contemplative Thought Box, Hannah Fhaye Oliver

Hannah Fhaye Oliver (she/they) is a SF based artist, writer, cook, facilitator, activist, ecosexual and current student in CCA’s dual degree program for Performance Art & Social Practice (MFA) and Visual & Critical Studies (MA). They find importance in maintaining a child-like wonder as it helps open the heart as well as being able to discern with a cool head in order to strengthen our intuition. Her practice always comes back to relationships, with ourselves and others from people to animals and nature. These days they are thinking about how we can bridge gaps of disconnection and work together to build a more loving action world.

The Tail, Selby Sohn

Selby Sohn is a Bay Area artist who makes objects and actions on the brink of utility. They consider both the tech industry’s hyperbolic usefulness and art history’s valuing of objects without utility. Most of their projects involve wearable sculptures that think largely about queering use — for example, in their piece Long Arms, they made arm extensions that allow people to slow dance from farther away. In many of their performance pieces, they also consider audience members to be performers.

Sohn’s work has exhibited nationally, internationally, and in outer space. Right now, their art is on a NASA PACE-1 satellite orbiting Earth, at Root Division in San Francisco, and at Dream Farm Commons in downtown Oakland. They have also shown at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Liminal Space, NIAD Art Center, the de Young Museum, 500 Capp Street (the David Ireland House), Dream Farm Commons, Berkeley Art Center, Root Division, Bass and Reiner in Minnesota Street Project, The Backyard Plague, Wave Collective Space, Cone Shape Top, the Edouard de Merlier Gallery at Cypress College, Flowers Art Gallery, Mercury 20 Gallery, The Faight Collective, The Search, Thee Stork Club, ATA Window Gallery, F8, Mission Bowling Club, Daily Diver, Borderline Art Collective, On-Off Site, 4 Star Theater, Verdi Club, Pacific Art League, A|AH|D Gallery at the University of Notre Dame, SOMArts, East Window in Boulder, Colorado, the City of Palo Alto Public Art Program, Fish Factory Art Space in Penryn, Cornwall, UK, and Supermarket in Stockholm, Sweden. 

Sohn curates a space called Your Mood Projects in Dogpatch, San Francisco, and their writing is published in KQED, Squarecylinder, The Racket Journal, Third Iris, Journal.fyi, and the LA Telephone Book.