Rhapsody : West
Rhapsody : West
A collaborative reading by Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai and Amanda Martin Katz
Thursday, July 1st | Doors + Cocktails 7:30pm | Performance 8pm
Aperol Spritz and Beer
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Rhapsody : West is a multimedia performative reading that was borne out of conversations between Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai and 3307 W Washington Blvd director Amanda Martin Katz. They connected initially through personal narratives of how the American West had impacted the trajectories of each of their lives and the formations of their senses of self. The two began to share books with one another, over the course of three months, that explore cultural myths and descriptions of the American West—texts that guided each of their emotional and theoretical navigations of landscapes that have come to inform “American” concepts of agency, gender, and citizenship. This first collaboration uses a structured improvisational process to combine Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai’s performative lecture format with Katz’s sonic practice of responsive reading, while together navigating a Google Maps-generated trail between the towns they have each, at one point, called home.
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Prima arrived in Tucson, AZ, in 2013 with the dream of living their fantasy of being a cowboy. After two years of trying to embody this persona, they came to reckon with the violence inherent to its gendering. They have been roaming the desert ever since.
Amanda spent much of this past year on a ranch in Wilson, WY, driving back and forth from Los Angeles five times (and once straight through to the Atlantic). Before moving to L.A., she briefly lived in Northern Utah. While she may have a thing for cowboys, her greatest love is the mountains.
Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai is a transdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, working in performance, video and installation. Born in Bangkok in 1989, they spent over a decade in Oxford and Paris. They earned their Visual Arts Degree (Diplome National des Arts Plastiques) from the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Nantes Métropole, in 2010 before pursuing a License in Film Studies (License en Cinéma et Audiovisuelle) at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 in 2011. In 2013, they completed their BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They obtained their MFA at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, in 2017. Their work addresses the structures of eurocentric masculine power in space and architecture, and their domination over the shaping of other identities. Through performative lectures and site-specific installations, they take apart the physical and structural tools of the Western academic, underlining the fictional nature of Western rationality and the way hegemony legitimizes certain truths over others. Recent projects include: Chloropsis Aurifrons Pridii, solo exhibition at The Fulcrum Press (Los Angeles), L.E.H.M. (Le Corbusier Entering Hadrian’s Mausoleum, 1965), solo exhibition at Actual Size, (Los Angeles), Seven Springs, in collaboration with Chris McKelway, Pieters Project, (Los Angeles), Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai and Pauline Gloss, Land And Sea (Oakland), Fieldnotes for Useful Light, Prelinger Library (San Francisco), Irrational Exhibits 11: Place-Making and Social Memory, Track 16 (Los Angeles), and The Anthropologist As Hero, in collaboration with Linda Franke, Justine Melford-Colegate and Jessica Hyatt, PAM Residencies (Los Angeles).
Amanda Martin Katz is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and facilitator based in Los Angeles. She works both independently and collaboratively to produce social, spatial, and performative embodiments of texts, as well as objects, text-objects, video installations, performances, and dialogic facilitations. For the past ten years, she has been designing and operating conceptual residency projects that explore collaborative inquiry and embodied research methodologies (in Katz’s Deli, since 2012, and BOOKSHELVES, since 2016). Recent exhibitions and published or performed works include “The Somatic Library,” Sluice, London (2020), Publishing Against the Grain, Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA (2019), “Non-Disclosure Agreement for Artist-Artist Sexual Relationships,” Foundations Magazine (2017) and Non-Disclosure Agreement: Contract Performance at New Women Space, Brooklyn (2018). She received a BA from Colgate University and a MFA from Otis College of Art and Design.
photos by Sijiang Hou
video by Stone Yu
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