Coaxial Arts Foundation is thrilled to announce Nat Decker as our May 2024 Artist in Residence. Exploring the theme “Error As Resistance” Nat will host a night of performances and a panel discussion about disability and protest. Crip Bloc: Disability and Protest Panel Friday, May 24th | 6:00PM to 7:30PM Featuring Nat Decker, Cielo Saucedo, thai Lu, Xixi Edelsbrunner, and Epseon (In person and Live Streamed) Error As Resistance: Performances Sunday, May 26th | 7:00PM to 9:00PM Featuring Nat Decker, Jules Chimes Gårder, thai Lu, More TBA (In person and Live Streamed) Error As Resistance: Gallery Hours Monday, May 27th | 1:00PM to 4:00PM *Mask wearing is required for all events. N/95, KN/95 masks will be provided. RSVP: https://withfriends.co/event/20098371/may_2024_artist_in_residence_nat_decker_error_as_resistance ERROR AS RESISTANCE borrows space for experimentation with digital disabled embodiment, and sensual installation…for inquiry into crip modes of protest and trans-national solidarity…for collective performance and grief…while operating on crip time. Disability includes the potential to embrace the noise, glitch, jitter, fragmentation, distortion of error as resistance to assimilatory normativity. Identification with error, failure, otherness forms meaning when rejecting a correctness, success, or belonging that are dependent on systems of exclusion and abuse. Difference becomes a crucial source in the identification of new routes and movements. And disabled people are recognized as crucial participants in the construction of emancipatory futures, with unique perspectives on interwoven systems of oppression and interdependence. These assertions operate within Nat’s layered and multi-dimensional practice of art and organizing that emphasizes the politically of the disabled body/mind. Technology is an assistive tool. It offers practical easements, access, modes of connection as abatement to social isolation, methods of organizing and action. Nat, who creates art as interplay between sculptural and computational processes, will investigate the construction of the virtual as a reflection/expansion/contraction of reality. Anti-quantization is conceptually utilized to resist the false normalization, fragile perfection, and default orientations of conventional representation. By cripping digital media, they will experiment with interactive motion capture and 3D digital renderings to express disabled agency in the virtual and extol the aesthetics of error. A public event on Sunday May 26th, 7PM to 9PM will include performances by Nat Decker, Jules Chimes Gårder, thai Lu, and more TBA. CRIP BLOC: DISABILITY AND PROTEST. This panel will explore the notion of a crip bloc, and methods of disability protest. Disabled people participating in on the ground protest confront numerous inaccessibilities and the realities of the body/mind: vulnerability, immobility, fatigue, over-stimulation, hyper-visibility. Security instructions - wear all black or discrete clothing, cover the face - fail to obfuscate the mobility device or bodily difference, resulting in increased susceptibility to surveillance. Public gathering and proximity to police can result in disproportionate risk, especially for multiply-marginalized people. If liberation is dependent on collective liberation, how can we make protest space more accessible, ensuring full community participation? Challenging the primacy of on the ground protest, this panel explores the infrastructures of remote action, collective presence, mutual aid, the leveraging of visibility and expertise, and how urgency interacts with crip time, slowness, softness, and access needs. Panelists for the May 24th event will include Nat Decker, Cielo Saucedo, thai Lu, and more TBA. _________ NAT DECKER Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago-born Los Angeles-based artist interpreting the intimacies of queer and disabled experience as provocation toward collective care and liberation. Working critically with technology, they identify the computer as an assistive tool affording a more accessible and capacious practice and the virtual as a space of potential which often mirrors patterns of exploitation and exclusion. Their practice fundamentally integrates accessibility as a generative medium. Working with computational and sculptural processes, they trace serpentine connections between the body and modes of technology, reimagining fantastical mobility devices as cultural expansion and agitation of conventional desirability politics. These non-functional devices operate as aesthetic scrutiny and frictional commentary on designations of usefulness and capitalistic innovation. Nat is a 2024 Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellow with their collective Cripping_CG, a Y10 member of NEW INC and was a 2023 Processing Foundation Fellow. They are also an access worker, consulting on accessibility for various arts organizations. In June 2022, they graduated from UCLA with a degree in Design|Media Arts and Disability Studies. IG: @crip_fantasy CIELO SAUCEDO Cielo Saucedo is an access worker and artist based in Los Angeles. Their work focuses on the dispersal of ableism through cultural economies. They work to dissolve the curative aspirations of technology. Their work encompasses computer generated imagery, sculpture and virtual reality. They received their BFA from School of the Art Institute, Chicago, and are currently an MFA candidate at UCLA. IG: @rare_earth_mineral THAI LU thai Lu is a transdisciplinary artist, writer, and community organizer centering their practice on the social, cultural, and physical effects of chronic illness. As a chronically ill, disabled, neurodivergent, and gender-divergent first generation American from a family of Vietnamese refugees, thai works at the intersections of Western bio-politics, Southeast Asian diaspora, post-war intergenerational suffering, relational ecologies of interdependence, and the concept of metamorphosis. https://www.sensiskins.com IG: @littleom JULES CHIMES GARDER Jules Chimes Gårder (they/she) is a Los Angeles based artist indebted to the patterns of demise and reconstruction that are prompted by loss and grief. They primarily work in sculpture, video and performance. Much of their work engages longitudinal experiences of mourning through collaborations with their mother Eva Chimes (posthumously). They recently received their BA in Art from UCLA and will begin the MFA program at Rutgers in Fall 2024. IG: @big.jules.xo XIXI EDELSBRUNNER Xixi Edelsbrunner (b. 1993) is a multimedia artist and transplant to Los Angeles, California, where they work and live an abundantly domestic life. They received an MFA in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art & Design in 2023 and a BA in Mathematics from Williams College, Massachusetts in 2016. They are a member of the artist collective, Queer Spa Network, which received a Lightning Grant from LACE in 2023. Their work has been shown in the GLAMFA exhibition at CSULB (2022), Coaxial Arts, Los Angeles (2023), the Tryst art fair put on by the Torrance Museum of Art (2023), and Proxy Gallery, Los Angeles (2024). IG: @xx_xrt_xixi_xx ESPEON Espeon (any pronoun) is a Los Angeles based artist writer healer orcanizer, currently teaching kids, reading tarot with pokémon cards, and making small work. They received a BA in Art from UCLA in 2019 and are working their way toward an MFA in Surviving and Healing with Chronic Illness at the University of Hanging in There IG: @3sp3on__