Doors 7pm
Program 7:30p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

Welcome to round two of a quarterly multimedia series combining live performance, reading, sound and image selected by poet Christine Larusso & writer and curator Rachael Rakes: We’re Sick to Death of All This Nonsense. It’s not ekphrasis. WS2DOATN is a live series merging words, sounds, and moving images, intended to reframe—or unframe—what constitutes the poetic, the time-based, the time-less, the urgent and endurant in art and discourse.

In January, we’ll be thinking about: Desire

This edition features readings from Morgan Parker, Jameson Fitzpatrick and Jenny Zhang, whose contributions will shape and respond to the theme in real time.

Each edition begins with the prompt of one word or phrase —from English and several other languages, which will be turned about through the program—with the composition of works, live performances, and other interjections openly combining with the desperate hells and imaginaries of the day. From this, we aim to follow the threads that unspool from this combination of fragments, feelings, artworks, and impermanence of the moment, guests, and audience.

Special thanks to pals at The Filmmaker’s Coop for their generous collaboration on this program.

Program

Reading from Morgan Parker

Sundown by Steve Reinke

8 min, 2023

A video diary from March 2020 to May 2023: years that cover the diarist’s museum show in Vienna, Covid, the death of Gordon Lightfoot and his mother, what it means to be a queer Nietzschean and why tattoos are always untimely.

Reading from Jameson Fitzpatrick

Fake Fruit Factory by Chick Strand

22 min, 1986

Intimate documentary about young women who make papier mache fruit and vegetables in a small factory in Mexico. They have a gringo boss, but the factory is owned by his Mexican wife. The focus of the film is on the color, music and movement involved, and the gossip which goes on constantly, revealing what the young women think about men.

Program Duration: 90 mins

Reading from Jenny Zhang

Bios

Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds, LLC, 2020). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts, she teaches first-year writing at New York University.

Morgan Parker is the author of five books, most recently the essay collection You Get What You Pay For, shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Nonfiction. Previous titles include Who Put This Song On?, a young adult novel; and the acclaimed poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches poetry at Swarthmore College and lives in Philadelphia with her dog, Shirley.

Jenny Zhang is the author of Sour Heart and My Baby First Birthday. She also writes for tv and film.

Christine Larusso holds a BA from Fordham University (Lincoln Center) and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bomb Magazine, Volume, the Colorado Review, Wildness, the Los Angeles Times, the Literary Review, Pleiades, Court Green, Narrative, and elsewhere. She was a Producer for Rachel Zucker’s podcast, Commonplace, and was a co-founder of the Commonplace School. She lives in Los Angeles most of the time.

Rachael Rakes is a writer, curator, educator, and researcher. She was recently the Artistic Director of the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2023. Currently Rakes is a Committee Member of the New York Film Festival, an Editor at Large for Verso Books, and a Contributing Editor for INFRASONICA.With Laura Huertas Millán and Onyeka Igwe, she organizes the artistic research initiative on co-subjective encounters, Counter-Encounters. From 2019–2022 she was the Curator for Public Practice at BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. Until 2019, she was the Head Curator and Manager of the Curatorial Programme at De Appel in Amsterdam. Rakes teaches in the Artificial Times Masters department at Sandberg, on Curating the moving image at Leiden University, and taught recently for the Parsons School of Art, Zine Eskola, HKU, KASK, Eugene Lang College, and Harvard University. Rakes is editor of the publications This, Too, Is a Map (2023, Sema/[NAME]), Toward the Not-Yet (2021, BAK/MIT Press), and Practice Space (2019, [NAME]/De Appel) and frequently publishes as a critic and essayist.