Together in Real Life

WCCW Community Marketplace at LAABF 2016
February 12–14, 2016

Printed Matter’s LA Art Book Fair, Friendly Fire section
Geffen Contemporary: 152 N Central Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Preview Thursday Feb 11, 6-9pm
Purchase Tickets to the Preview

This quarter at the WCCW we are investigating the theme of Soft Power: what are the forces which can enact attraction or persuasion without coercion? We think about physical proximity, the hum of a crowd, unexpected encouragement from a stranger.

Accordingly, we present Together in Real Life, a pop-up community marketplace at our LAABF table which investigates the nature of person to person attraction and persuasion in the marketplace. We are there to sell and buy, how do we complete these exchanges in meaningful, intimate and non-coercive ways?

What are the modes of exchange between seller and buyer? What ways can these modes be reimagined? We will be joined by 10 artists in residence to help us explore these types of questions. Radical salesmanship, special interactions, and participatory performances may occur!

Thursday February 11
Opening Night Reception

6-9pm – RARA Magazine 
Rachel Barrett and Aimee Hunter of RARA Magazine will bring specialty cakes and other tasty treats for sample and sale. They will engage in conversations with the guests about their ever-adapting practice, nutrient dense recipes and the positive impact ingredients have on our bodies.

RARA aims to enhance the natural state of foods and stay in rhythm with the seasons. We highlight plants over animals and take a stem-to-stalk approach in our cooking, as part of our commitment to eliminating waste from our process. Combining collective passions and educations, our work is inspired by local markets, quality whole foods, and nutrition. The culinary phrase mise en place translates from French to mean ‘everything in it’s place.’ We believe this sentiment extends beyond the kitchen into the entire food system, with hard work and clean energy, one turnip at a time.

6-9pm – Frannie Garretson
Themed around her prints and piñatas, Frannie Garretson will offer fresh beet juice cocktails (non-alcoholic) and talk to people about making rhythmic beats and how cycles function in our lives.

Frances Garretson was born and raised in Los Angeles and studied Fine Art at Oberlin College and in the Kansai region of Japan. As a third generation artist, her formal training has been complimented by a lifetime of exposure to creativity on a personal, day-to-day level. This has led to a practice that embraces improvisation, giving credit to work done outside the formal boundaries of the studio as an essential part of the process of creation. Recent media include food, shadow puppetry, ink painting, printmaking, dance, and papier-mache.

Friday February 12

1-3pm – Jesy Odio
Jesy will be collecting phone numbers at the booth, and then sending out poems via text. The recipients can engage in the text conversation by replying back and interacting with the writer, if they desire. If not the poems can always be read later, in bed before falling asleep.

Jesy Odio is a native of Costa Rica, based in Los Angeles.

3-6pm – Which Witch
Which Witch will present HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY? providing shelter and refuge for bodies in pain, minds in tumult, and bag-burdened souls at the 2016 LAABF. They’ll provide pillows and chairs to rest, hot tea to imbibe, water, chocolate, tampons, tissues, vitamins, aromatic natural oils, hand lotion, etc. – all free for those who might desire them. In the tradition of woman-to-woman confession, shared secrets, word of mouth treatments, superstitions, and covert tactics of feminine care, they invite strangers and friends to sit and offload their afflictions as needed.

Which Witch L.A. is a fem-focused publishing platform based in Los Angeles. Founded by Adriana Widdoes and Emma Kemp in 2014, WWLA is interested in community building around printed matter, with an inclination towards image-text practices, creative nonfiction, collaborative works, provocative gestures, and curated events.

 

Saturday February 13

11am-1pm – Allison Conner
Allison Conner is organizing a conversation around publishing’s connection to access, community, and resistance. She’ll hand out a questionnaire asking folks who visit our booth if they would respond to a set of questions dealing with their thoughts around print/power. Reflections will be compiled into a zine and all who participate will receive a copy.  

Loose Pleasures is a collaborative press project run by Allison Conner and Patrick O’Neil. Through zines and other print ephemera, Loose Pleasures explores the ways in which publishing can rewrite our notions of activation, community, access, resistance, participation, and healing. 

1-4pm – Sarah Petersen
Sarah Peterson will have a fake-tattoo-application station where she will apply the “(underinsured)” tattoo to anyone who would like to wear one. During the transaction, she will engage those getting tattooed in a  “what kind of book do you want to be?” discussion.

Sarah Petersen is a multidisciplinary artist currently teaching at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, developing apps and performances, and deciding which city to call home. Her project SWAG for Hard Times, begun in 2009, continues to be relevant despite her hopes to the contrary, so the best thing to do is share it.

4-7pm – Katie J Smyser
Fueled by an interest in Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, Katie J. Smyser invites visitors to “let go” of (or at least ponder) relations of cruel optimism in their own lives. They will be invited to part with a relevant object, or if they don’t have one on hand, will be offered origami paper to draw their object. The paper will then be folded into a sea turtle, a reference to the Japanese fairy tale Urashima Taro (Katie’s grandmother’s copy of the story will be on hand to read.) Once finished, people can leave their turtle, keep them, or trade them for someone else’s on the table. Their degree of attachment, divulging, and exchange is entirely up to them.

Katie J. Smyser is a writer whose current works explore sadness: how do we learn to be sad, who do we learn from, and how are we to deal with outside expectations to perform sadness properly? Is there a correct way to perform sadness, when identity is so prismatic? To what degree can we control our sadness– how could releasing certain fantasies, attachments, and physical objects transform our sadness? Katie isn’t sure but hopes to figure some of this shit out.

 

Sunday February 14

11am-1pm – Eileen Hsu 
Eileen Hsu will set-up a speech-free dialogue interaction. A sign will ask say: “Give words a break. Let’s converse with drawings and coloring for 10 minutes, ok?” If the person agrees, Eileen will quickly draw a half-finished line drawing that she’ll offer to the visitor to respond to by further line drawing and/or coloring in. The drawings will deal with aspirations, hopes, fears, possibilities.

Eileen Hsu is a Pasadena-based graphic designer who writes and illustrates. Eileen’s work aims to bring out the novel and mischievous in seemingly mundane activities. Wonderment is everywhere.

1-4pm – Sara Fowler & Cindy Rehm
Inspired by a Nancy Spero’s sending Lucy Lippard a letter in 1971 with the simple but impassioned message: “The enemies of women’s liberation in the arts will be crushed. Love Nancy.” Sara Fowler and Cindy Rehm invite participants to pen a letter to their favorite feminist. Collaborators will be invited to profess their love, send words of support and encouragement, or unleash their feminist fury in a letter to a contemporary or historic feminist. The letters will be compiled into a zine and all collaborators will receive a copy.

Sara Ellen Fowler develops sculpture, writing, and performance projects utilizing epistolary forms, photography and notebooking as a way of stalking her subjects. Poetics are a guiding formal interest as well as inventory and curation process. She considers inquiry a spiritual practice and list making a form of prayer. These values manifest in the deconstruction of relic domestic objects or the acts of haunting and archiving material to create a sense of intimacy and possession. She has studied at Art Center College of Design and the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Writing and objects have been presented in Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, and Milwaukee and on the Internet.

Cindy Rehm is a Los Angeles based artist and an educator. She is the co-founder and director of Craftswoman House Temporary Residence and a member of the Association of Hysteric Curators. Rehm’s work has been shown at national and international venues including: Elephant; Los Angeles, Woman Made Gallery; Chicago, LACE; Los Angeles, Goliath Visual Space; Brooklyn, Paul Robeson Gallery; Rutgers, ARC Gallery; Chicago, Transformer; Washington DC, Interaction IV; Sardinia, Italy, the Archeological Museum; Varna, Bulgaria and at Mains d’Oeuvres; Saint Ouen, France. Rehm’s work may be viewed at cindyrehm.com

4-6pm – Sarah Soquel Morhaim
A while back, Sarah Soquel Morhaim heard an anecdote of a study where a crew was sent into an office environment to arbitrarily paint a wall yellow. As the crew did their job, the people in the office reported a positive feeling of being taken care of. Simple attention, even from seemingly arbitrary actions, without any grander service, appeared to have therapeutic benefits. During her residency Sarah will playfully explore a loose translation of this Yellow Wall study. Dressing in head to toe yellow and creating a tiny altar space with offerings, including custom-made fortune cookies, she will explore if/how small gestures of presence affect us. More of a ‘guide’ at the table, than a ‘seller’, she will create ritual, even in abstract appearance, in the service of awareness and presence to others.

Sarah Soquel Morhaim is a Los Angeles-based artist. Her photography has appeared in W, Capricious, Paris-LA, and New York Magazine, among others, and her short films have screened at the Sundance Film Festival, Palm Springs International, AFI Fest, and the Austin Film Society. Her work has exhibited at MOCA, Synchronicity Space and Family, and books and zines of her work have been published internationally. Her bi-weekly photo essays are posted at sarahsoquel.com/latest and she sings and plays guitar in the band SOQUEL CURRY.

We will be hosting a community marketplace for our residents and select members to distribute their own publications. We’re excited to have books, zines and other special objects from:

Emily Baker
Allison Conner
Ania Diakoff
Feminist Library on Wheels
Sara Fowler
Frannie Garretson
Morgan Green
The Hag
Eileen Hsu
MATERIAL
Sarah Soquel Morhaim
Jesy Odio
Otherwild
Raincoat Mag
RARA Magazine
Sarah Petersen
Cindy Rehm
Courtney Richter
Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs
Katie J Smyser
Which Witch
Meg Whiteford