March 8, 2013
I’ll be performing works in progress from a new adventure-in-progress of mine, A Mind At Morning Tide: Psychiatry, Homosexuality, and the Atom Bomb.
The performance is part of a new interdisciplinary performance series at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn, curated by composer James Illgenfritz.
March 23, 2013
Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11238
7pm – James Ilgenfritz & Omar Tamez (bass & guitar)
8PM – Mark Lamoureux (29 Cheeseburgers + 39 Years)
8:30 – Quintan Ana Wikswo and James Illgenfritz
9PM – NewBorn Trio (Jeffrey Lependorf – shakuhachi / Miguel
Frasconi & Katie Down – glass instruments)
ABOUT THE PROJECT:
In 2011, Quintan Ana Wikswo began work on A MIND A MORNING TIDE, exploring the rumor of an undocumented site in New York City that, in the 1940s, simultaneously housed a secret laboratory of the Manhattan Project and a state-operated, police enforced psychiatric facility where people arrested for homosexual activity were forcibly electroshocked.
A young woman named L. Aurora is thought to have spent several years of her life within this building.
Lingering mysteries surround her experience and appearance there.
According to conflicting mythos, oral histories, archival documents and apocryphal personal correspondence, L. Aurora was either an institutionalized lesbian or a mathematician working on the atomic bomb…or both.
Her recovered secret papers and field notes reveal her discovery that a far lengthier history of experimental projects existed at the site, conducted over the centuries by the original indigenous inhabitants, French fur trappers, Dutch colonialists, pirates, pioneers, capitalists, and intellectual property speculators.
A MIND AT MORNING TIDE is a series of photographs, films, and original texts that take shape as artist’s books, installations, projections, exhibition, and performance works.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Recognized for her genre-crossing exploration of new forms, hybrids, and emerging fields, Quintan Ana Wikswo’s adventurous vision and controversial projects integrate her original texts in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and libretto, as well as her original alternative process photography, 35mm films, and live performance works. Her transdisciplinary projects are exhibited, published, and performed at prominent institutions in New York, Los Angeles, France, and Germany, including three major solo museum exhibitions in New York City and Berlin. A 2013 Creative Capital Grantee in Emerging Forms, her work has been honored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Center for Cultural Innovation, Yaddo, ARC-Durfee, Villa Montalvo Arts Center, Djerassi, Puffin Foundation, Millay Colony and many others. Her literary work appears regularly in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, New American Writing, Alaska Quarterly Review, WITNESS, and many more, as well as numerous artist’s books, catalogues, anthologies and four monographic DVD collections.
Wikswo is the Co-Artistic Director of Fieldshift Further, a transdisciplinary performance company creating new works at sites of human rights and ecological trauma. She is also a performing artist with FlashPoint, a NYC-based text-and-music live performance ensemble, and is a core artist with Catalysis Projects a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary collaborative new works company.