September 18, 2021
7:00 - 8:00 PM
Southern Exposure, 3030 20th Street
Limited capacity, RSVP at calendly.com

Following the opening reception of MONOLITH, please join us for joint durational performances from Edgar Fabián Frías and Jess Robbins. Frías will ceremonially create a container for self-healing around their work. Following the hate crime vandalization of their billboard installation depicting them amongst their ancestors, the violated remains of that project have been installed in SoEx’s gallery. During this ceremonial performance, titled Ancestral Offering, Frias will disarm the intended violence and reclaim their honor and beauty within an indigenous ancestry.

Simultaneously, Jess Robbins will be enacting her own ritual of making precarious shoes, or Stand-Ins, the object ephemera of her conceptual pursuit of a Mother. Departing from her craftsmanship as a fine leatherworker, these transient sculptural works decontextualize the value of trash as much as they reframe our consideration of footwear. In performing the act of constructing shoes to fit a doppelgänger-model’s feet, the question of who is standing-in presents us with the possibility that the feet were found to fit the shoe. With an uncertainty as to which molds and which forms, this performance titled Are You My Mother? cheekily ritualizes the construction of a mother mold.