Trans Art Is Live Performances

Saturday Sept 15 6-9pm
1511 Berwyn Ave, Chicago, IL 60640

 

Our Performing Artists

*Greenlee Brown
Greenlee Brown is a trans singer documenting how voices and music shift throughout transition. Their solo project is called Transposition Diaries, an archive of covers focusing on songs they felt they would lose access to once testosterone lowered their voice.

*Devin Clara
Devin Clara is a local Chicago composer/performer whose background is mainly in classical, jazz, and electronic music. While performing, she switches between mandolin, vocals, and trumpet, playing support and lead roles, often while heavily featuring her bandmates via written compositions. Her most recent project, Sneaky Archer, is a collection of past musical and life experiences that have built up in the form of a classical chamber-style ensemble, featuring songwriting and instrumental writing in a
blender of styles and forms. As a transgender artist, she hopes to help contribute to destroying the notion that you must strictly conform to what is expected of you in art and in life.

*Zane Debord
Zane DeBord (they/them) is an eclectic musician whose projects range from highly coordinated contemporary jazz to freely improvised music. Originally a bassist, they have been exploring the use of guitar in their newest solo album, “be a happy cat”.

*Hereaclitus Here Vernon
Hereaclitus Here Vernon, is interested in what Shannon Bell refers to as fast feminism, and their trans-disciplinary gustemverks over the last 33 years, attempt and often fail, but still protean like, they move through it shapeshifting in serpentine motion. By mashing up sexual politics, identity politics and violent philosophy. They once asked how can we become feminist, queer, post pornographers, hyper-masculinized, as in the hypermasculinist work of Paul Virilio who theorizes that power, is about being first and fastest? This postulates that power is exercised through speed and acceleration which was gendered, polemic, exhausting and maxed out the adrenals, So after working against gender and power, those masks came down. They are also assembling a book of paintings, entitled, “Birdbrains”, using their poetry, that intersect neuroscience, birds, and trauma. In tandem over 4 years, Here, has been filming, “Heroclitus the film”, a trans mythic tale of redemption using nature and the dark powerful feminine archetype, Lilith. Living out in the woods for a year to transition to a, Trans GNC individual, has proven to be the spiritual elixir, and the ultimate boon for the melancholia of the dark soul. If you see Hereaclitus Here, be sure to use the they/them pronouns. Here has also recently joined the TRANS ART IS, platform as an art curator, writer and outreach educator, helping trans/GNC artists have a platform and a voice through exhibition opportunities, screenings and exhibitions.

*NAXÖ
Mirza N. Shams, under his/their stage name NAXÖ, is a queer/gender-fluid Egyptian music producer, composer, pianist, keyboardist, and singer. NAXÖ’s work conjures a magical concoction that blends electronic/psychedelic waves and beats with the nostalgia of MENA/SWANA folklore and eastern classical music that captures the liminality through lyrics and their voices whispering to resist and re-imagine kinder worlds.
Samples began creating their/his own hybrid into a club sound that fits as well in theaters and festivals as it does on dance floors. NAXÖ was born in early 2013, producing and performing fusions of dubstep, psytrance, folktronica, electronica, and psychedelic music. Compositions are consisted of Middle-eastern North-african folklore/classical music, particularly Egyptian using stringed instruments like Oud, Kanoon, Bouzouki, and Strings sections blended with groovy electronic rhythms and bass lines accompanied by eastern percussion like Tabla, and Duff and electronic dominant drumming styles influenced by rock, jazz, trap-hop and psychedelic music.

*Jesi Gaston
5 artist bios have been sent in. All have been denied. They will do a short standup set.

*Tofu Daddy and Rene Arturo Geraldo Veloira Cubacub III
Rene is a Filipinx-American Macho Dancer, who loves to show off his bod with body rolls and strong poses! He is the Kuya (older brother) of Sky Cubacub , who is the creator of Rebirth Garments, a clothing line for people on the full spectrum of Gender, Size and Ability and the Radical Visibility Zine, a magazine geared towards queer and disabled teens.
A new baby queer drag king to Chicago, Tofu Daddy is a world class bodybuilder and cage fighter from China. Though he has a tough as nails exterior, he’s also shy and timidly bicurious and wants to know if you think his butt is cute. (Tofu Daddy is played by Alex Chen, a UX designer and mixed media artist who’s not a cage fighter, but does love mixed martial arts.)

*KJ Whitehead
As featured in the Chicago Reader and Voyage Chicago, KJ (They/She) is happy to perform for Trans Art Is and Andersonville Art Week. She’s an instructor at The Second City, the production scout of The Playground Theater and the self-proclaimed: Queen of Radical Comedy. They’ve been seen at Chicago Fringe Festival (2017), Yippiefest (Chicago, IL 2017), Lady Laughs Comedy Festival (Madison, WI 2017) and most recently, Charm City Comedy Festival (Baltimore, MD 2018). KJ promises that the patriarchy won’t just be smashed, it will be decimated with glitter and unapologetic blackness! Follow them/her on social media @iamkjwhitehead
Upcoming shows:
9/20 2POC @ iO: The Mission Theater 10PM
9/27 Arts & Culture Club’s HORNY @ Celtic Crown 8PM
9/27 Strangermajik @ Late Bar 10PM

*Forced Into Femininity
Forced Into Femininity is the long time EcoHorror project of Jill Lloyd Flanagan. Forced Into Femininity punctuates her unhinged vocal performances with screams and stentorian spoken word proclamations that sound out alongside fragments of melodic quasi-crooning. Her voice fuses the bark of post-punk or hardcore with the wailing catharsis of Diamanda Galás, while the composite sum of her vocals and productions reaches us as an alien breed of industrial noise performance at its most transfixing heights of confusion. Flanagan’s raucous compositions burst with peals of raw noise static and thick drum machine thuds that collide in seemingly random configurations of loping rhythm. Her live sets streak off into chaos with any number of performative touches : including but not limited to donning grotesque body-horror costumes, dousing the audience in insects, and climbing any available structure in venues and their surroundings.
She has released “Erraticism” On Pop Nihil and “Heterochromea” on Hausu Mountain Records . She was also in the bands Coughs, Learned Helplessness and currently plays in CB Radio Gorgeous in Chicago.

*Safety Scissor Death Squad
Safety Scissor Death Squad is the primary musical outlet of Tennessee-born and Chicago-based musician and producer Sydney Pride(they/she). Initially specializing in noise, ambient, and drone, Safety Scissor Death Squad has moved on to lo-fi art/hypnagogic pop with a significant 80s and 2010s influence.