Blank Sign Book Release Party and Beast Nest Performance

Special Event

Blank Sign Book Release Party and Beast Nest Performance

Saturday, June 29 7:00PM - 9:30PM

SoEx and Wolfman Books are excited to present Blank Sign Book – a collection of essays on art, artists, beauty, and politics by the poet and art writer, Anne Lesley Selcer. A selection of Selcer’s ranging expositions and guided interrogations into the communicative gestures of art, the book navigates the maelstrom of image-rich contemporary culture through the work of Ana Mendieta, The Otolith Group, Juliana Huxtable, Dolores Dorantes, Janet Cardiff, Ragnar Kjartansson, and more.

Join us this Saturday, June 29 to celebrate the release of Blank Sign Book at Southern Exposure! Selcer will be reading from the collection and will also be in conversation with the dynamically likeminded and brilliant artist and art writer, Genevieve Quick. With a shared interest in the intersections of art and politics, electronic musician and political educator Sharmi Basu (aka Beast Nest) will also be performing. Of course, since it's a book release there will be snacks, drinks, extreme insight and merriment!

Blank Sign Book is available now online and at Wolfman Books in downtown Oakland.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
ANNE LESLEY SELCER
is an art writer and a poet in the expanded field. Blank Sign Book is a collection of essays moving though the tensions and potentials between art and politics. Sun Cycle, winner of the CSU Poetry Center First Poetry Book Prize will be out September 2019. Named for the star that makes vision possible, it investigates image, power and gender. She is author of From A Book of Poems on Beauty, winner of the Gazing Grain prize, a chapbook emerging from her multidisciplinary research into Western beauty. Anne Lesley’s art writing includes Banlieusard, a commissioned book-length text on media and sense memory for Artspeak and Untitled (a treatise on form) for 2nd Floor Projects, a limited edition pamphlet in tandem with an exhibition. Critical writing appears in Fillip, Art Practical, Hyperallergic, The Capilano Review, Open Space, the anthology New Media Art 2017: Back to Nature, as well as in several exhibition catalogs, the most recent forthcoming this Fall for the Mills College Art Museum. Poetry appears in Fence, The Chicago Review, and Action, Yes! among several other small magazines. Anne Lesley wrote a column for Jacket2 on “art resistant to the transformation of social life into a frontier market” and a series of essays for SFMOMA’s Open Space on language and the moving image. In Vancouver BC, she created the Chroma Reading Series for creative research, artists working in language, and poetry; she was an initiating and contributing editor there to the Public Works anthology of art writing. Her language-based video, sound and text pieces have exhibited at the Krowswork, Visible Verse Festival, Southern Exposure, T-10 Video festival, and on Gauss PDF. Anne Lesley’s practice has been supported by residencies at Krowswork, Mildred’s Lane and Southern Exposure, and in tandem with the Nonsite collective, by The Headlands Center for the Arts and SFCameraworks.

GENEVIEVE QUICK is a San Francisco based artist and arts writer. She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has shown her work in galleries in the Bay Area. She has been awarded residencies at the Mills College, de Young Museum, MacDowell, Djerassi, and Yaddo. Quick has received a CCI Investing in Artists grant and a Kala Fellowship. She has contributed writings to Shotgun Review, The Present Group, and Temporary Art Review. Quick regularly contributes to Art Practical.

SHARMI BASU is an Oakland born and based South Asian woman of color creating experimental music as a means of decolonizing musical language. She attempts to catalyze a political, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining her anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts. Beast Nest, Sharmi's primary performing project, utilizes an unwavering depression and restrained horror to channel left-eyed spirits. She is an MFA graduate from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media and has worked with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, John Bischoff, Pauline Oliveros, Chris Brown, Maggi Payne, and more. Her workshops on “Decolonizing Sound” have been featured at the International Society for Improvised Music, the Empowering Women of Color Conference, and have reached international audiences. She performs almost 100 times a year and has toured through the US and Canada as well as internationally in Europe. She specializes in new media controllers, improvisation in electronic music, and intersectionality within music and social justice. She also founded and hosts an all people-of-color improvisation and performance group called the MARA Performance Collective in Oakland, CA and was an organizer the Universe is Lit: A Bay Area Black and Brown Punk Fest. Sharmi is imperfect and is always learning and hopes to help develop a world that embraces and nourishes self-empowerment for all people.