Seeking to create gallery spaces that center human connection and radical joy, Painted Bride’s Off the Wall exhibition will create “extroverted” environments that are designed to encourage conversation between strangers, artists, and people who’ve traditionally been excluded from galleries.
There are timed entry slots, but you are welcome to enjoy the experience for as long as you'd like after entering the space.
COVID SAFETY: Masks are required during the experience. Proof of vaccination or recent negative test required for entry.
Hosted by Lili St. Queer and Icon Ebony Fierce.
EXPERIENCES
Mehgan Abdel-Moneim will present Meet Me at the Trash Yard. We're taking out the garbage! Experience your everyday waste transformed into a kinetic, magnetic, plastic laboratory. Drop by the outdoor installation to build sculptures and play games- all while learning about the properties of plastic and magnetism. All ages are welcome to explore this trashy pop-up sculpture garden.
Obvious Agency's "Care (About Each Other) Package" is a community-supported art project of 15 original interactive performances crafted with care by your favorite local artists. Each piece explores themes of reconnection across change, distance, and the unknowable. Newly adapted into an installation format for Off the Wall, each of these new parlor games for the 21st century will invite you to engage with everyday objects in new and silly ways. You can learn more about the project, order digital copies of your favorite games, and meet the artists here: https://www.obvious-agency.com/shop
Severin Blake is creating a project called Medicine Meditation, an immersive sound-based installation with touch points in science, spirituality, ancestry, and healing. Participants are given meditation prompts and invited to contribute to a living oral tradition.
Savannah Reich will be putting on an excerpt of Oedipus in Seattle, an auto-theater mash-up between "Oedipus Rex" and "Sleepless in Seattle" that explores our evolving cultural ideas about fate and what is meant to be. Two people get up on stage and put on headphones; by following the instructions they hear, they become performers in an unrehearsed "play" about randomness and chance. To be played by groups of two at a time, and watched by anyone or no one.
Roopa Vasudevan will be presenting Provocations For/On Technology, a series of experimentally rendered QR codes, hung throughout the exhibition space. The codes contain flaws, misalignments and imperfections, pointing to a manual design and production process, but they will still be identifiable as QR codes and scannable with mobile devices. These codes link to a series of custom websites built for the project, which actively engage visitors with questions about digital presence, instinct, and embodiment. They serve as prompts to connect interpersonally with others in the same space; suggestions for ways for visitors to engage their bodies; provocations for utilizing/interacting with their devices in different manners; and opportunities for them to leave messages or content for future visitors to pick up and engage with. Together, the codes offer an opportunity for visitors to question their default practices when it comes to digital devices, as well as a chance to playfully engage with the physical space of the exhibition, the digital space afforded by the project, and each other.
ARTIST BIOS
Icon Ebony Fierce is a Philadelphia based performance artist that has one mission: to change people's perception of artistic expression one subculture at a time. Icon has a background in theatre, dance, and spoken word performance. Icon has been community organizing, curating events all throughout Philadelphia since 2012. Icon also specializes in burlesque, performance art, and drag. Their content includes body positivity, political/social issues, gender equality, etc. They are also a curator for festivals like Phreak N Queer, Hot Bits Film Festival and more things always centering QTPOC people with an alternative point of view. Icon is currently a board member of the William Way Community Center.
Lili St. Queer is a musician, cabaret & theatre artist, drag queen, comedian, educator, and DJ. They are a co-founder of Jaffe St. Queer Productions, whose recent partnership with the Penn Museum produced the original musical "Eric & Lili's Night at the Museum," and their cabaret duo Glitter & Garbage was named Philly Magazine's Best Cabaret Act 2019. Lili is also the prettiest cast member in their recurring one-woman show "Cabaret Sauvignon."
Savannah Reich is a playwright and screenwriter based in Philadelphia. She holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied with Rob Handel. Her plays have been commissioned or developed by Walking Shadow Theater Company, the University of Minnesota, SuperGroup, and the Playwrights Center, and she has been supported by residencies at Tofte Lake Art Center and MassMoCA. Her feature length screenplay “Beebe and Barton” was the winner of the Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize in 2015, and her short film “Men Among Men” was the winner of the Bill Murray Comedy Award at the Twin Cities Film Festival in 2020. She was a 2020/21 McKnight Fellow at the Playwrights Center, and currently teaches playwriting and screenwriting at the University of the Arts.
Mehgan Rose Abdel-Moneim is a dance, performance and visual artist based in Philadelphia. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Political Studies from Bard College, where she also studied dance technique and composition.
Mehgan has performed for Sheila Zagar, Rosy Simas Danse, and David Gordon, MAC Cosmetics and Lady HD among others. She has presented original performance pieces at The Secret City Art Revival, EDANCO 2019, KYL/D's 2020 InHale Performance Series and more.
Though usually a dancer and performer, Mehgan began experimenting with found object sculpture and visual art when the pandemic led us into isolation. Since then, she has participated in shows at HOT∙BED and InLiquid, and taken to building ideas out of trash and bartered items.
Mehgan currently works as a freelance artist and as the Lead Teaching Artist at Asian Arts Initiative.
Obvious Agency is a worker-owned cooperative that creates interactive, experiential art that ranges from the personal, to the institutional, to the ridiculous. Blending theatrical and digital arts, we develop spaces where participants can co-create their own experiences through first-hand exploration. Always serious, always silly, we believe that by helping create and define culture, we can create systemic and interpersonal change. In the past, our work has been commissioned by the Barnes Foundation, Temple University, and Moore College of Art and Design. Obvious Agency has four worker-owners: Joseph Ahmed, Arianna Gass, Daniel Park, and Cat Ramirez.
Roopa Vasudevan is a South Asian-American media artist, computer programmer and researcher, currently based in the part of Lenapehoking now known as Philadelphia. Her work examines social and technological defaults; interrogates rules, conventions and protocols that we often ignore or take for granted; and centers humanity and community in explorations of technology’s impacts on society. She is currently a member of the Vox Populi artist collective (Philadelphia); a member of the Art & Code track at NEW INC, the art and technology incubator at the New Museum (New York, NY); and a doctoral candidate in Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Severin Blake My name is Severin Blake. Pronouns (they/all/we). The work we create interrogates language, imagery, and linear time. We write in response to the world(s) we see around and within us. As a creator we believe art is not a passive experience but an interactive one. We facilitate intentional spaces of bravery, vulnerability and joy making.