“ ‘My wound is inside me. It is the wound of lack of love. Since you can’t see it, you say it isn’t here. But I’ve been hurt in my feelings. My feelings’re my brains. My feelings’re now nerves which have been torn out. Beyond the hole between my legs, the flesh torn turned and gnashed, inside that red mash or mess, lies a woman. No one ever ventures here.’ ” Kathy Acker, Don Quixote
Cassandra Troyan is a writer, organizer, and ex-artist whose work explores the terror of becoming female amidst the accelerated haze of contemporary culture, deriving pleasure and power from juxtapositions of submission, violence, queer romance, sex work, horror, and capital. They are the author of three books, most recently KILL MANUAL (Artifice Books, 2014) and HATRED OF WOMEN (Solar Luxuriance 2014) and have presented, performed, or screened their work at Spectacle Theater, Brooklyn NY; Athens International Film Festival, Athens, OH; One Minute Film Festival, Narrowsburg, NY; Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin County CA; Modern Art Oxford, UK; MASS MoCA, North Adams MA; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; PLUG Projects, Kansas City, MO; MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK; Siena Art Institute, Siena, Italy; KRETS, Malmö, Sweden; Microlights Cinema, Milwaukee WI; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL and the Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL.
Their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Shifter Magazine, The Chicago Review, Elderly, and ANCIENTS. Since 2010 they have curated the reading and performance series ARTIFICIAL EAR with numerous friends and collaborators. They received their MFA in Visual Art from the University of Chicago and work with sex workers, prisoners, and radical feminists in Chicago, IL where they currently live.
DUSK AT THE GALLOWS (HD Video, 24:18, 2013)
A Tuscan horror film pared down to its affective tropes, both in the Italian landscape and filmic genre. Cinematic feelings are constructed out of the remnants of a quotidian world, making it all the more terrifying by what is hidden, and what is revealed. Torture, allure, mystery, and the sacred create an unconventional narrative where the characters’ motives might unfold, yet the viewer can only experience them as a series of traces. The women are left as ruptures surfacing in the residue of an environment, attempting to voice some desired intensity, violence, or hysteria until they are stifled and pushed into another unknown world. What is to be feared within this terrain? Must the element causing terror always surface, or reveal itself like the monster or psychopath lurking around the shadowy corner? Or might it exist in some other semblance of meaning, remaining visually unrepresentable? In DUSK AT THE GALLOWS, what cannot be seen holds the greatest threat, and means for discovering a deeper notion of trauma and historical violence in the dark heart of Italy’s mysterious influence. Performances by (in order of appearance): Kirsten Bockrath, Cody Troyan, Sarah Mendelsohn, Danielle Rosen, Nausicaa Renner, Katherine Harvath, Sophia Rhee, and Chelsea America Torres.
THE WHOLE FORMS A SYNDROME (HD Video, 12:19, 2013)
THE WHOLE FORMS A SYNDROME, is a meditation on the mediated subject gone raw, as this work explores residual matter in the politics of resistance, and what it means to be out of sync, in opposition. Historical vamping of prominent figures of authority (a gay Nietzsche, Slavoj Zizek, the Godfather, Karl Marx) this work questions the nature of collectivity and radical gestures as a correspondence between Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse interrogates the practice of theory put into violence. The performance of the political experienced as a trace, as the AK-47 that gets brandished, is the same weapon shooting a barely visible target, the punctures marked only by puffs of dust and hot shells flying out of the weapon in a soundscape of explosions.
PLEASE RECONSTRUCT THE NIGHT (HD Video, 10:00, 2015)
Utilizing liminal spaces of violence in hardcore pornography juxtaposed with BDSM scene descriptions in Troyan’s book, KILL MANUAL, PLEASE RECONSTRUCT THE NIGHT examines the potential for authentic encounters of surrender in economic libidinal spheres, especially where the possibility of shame is eradicated.
THE PUSH TO PULL THE FLOW FROM LIFE’S DISTURBANCE (TERROR FANTASIA) (HD Video, 05:18, 2012)
The nausea. A scene constructed out of a negatively saturated world. There is a frontal collide of two figures at a table which explodes into another set of figures performing a strange play-acting on the beach. Gestures of abandon shown by gleefully running and rolling in the sand builds a desirous landscape reminiscent of 90s music video tropes only to morph into the stickiness of rap. What is more absurd than wanting to be that which you cannot be? Of having to find one’s self in a language that is not just indecipherable, but the code is the language itself. It is only in using the language that initially seems foreign, can one begin to translate. Featuring performances by Rachel Ellison, Nabiha Khan, and Cassandra Troyan.
Or just come and take it all in! One hour of shorts are accepted monthly on an open revolving basis, anything goes with the screened work, and the refreshments are pretty good too.