Keijaun Thomas, 'The Poetics of Trespassing', SPILL Festival of Performance 2014, photo by Guido Mencari.
Join HRLA as we welcome Chicago-based artist Keijaun Thomas. This is Thomas's first performance in Los Angeles. Sunday evening, April 19. 6PM-8PM. 10-15$ suggested donation.
Partitions of Separation and Trespassing
Section 1. Selective Seeing
Part 2. Looking While Seeing Through
Section 2. Painted Images, Colored Symbols
Part 3. Sweet like Honey, Black like Syrup
In 4 zones, where one is sometimes 3rd, 3rd is four and sometimes two is 1st.
Thomas is constantly thinking about placement, our placement, lack of place, here.
The structure cannot be pure(ly) viewed as linear, horizontal nor vertical.
Moving through space, spreading materials— poring sugar and coffee like a stream of piss.
You can taste it, bitter and sweet. If I am looking at you from a pile of green A3 land
stacked high like a hill; I see you from a distance. Distance is Not Separation.
In four zones, through a panel of glass covered in textual lube, thick, not separate.
I see your yellow boots, your black hair, synthetic texture sticking like a cracker on honeyed flesh.
Can you feel it?
I am in Florida riding through a thick haze of red and black smoke. A controlled, wild forest fire.
If you see the smoke rising on an idle Sunday in Los Angeles, know that I see it, too.
If only from a distance. The Poetics of Trespassing. Stomach pressed to the floor, sneaky. Whatchu looking at? Us.
Painted like syrup on a black box chest, filtered with vaseline, sticky.
Athletes on plantation grounds, clean it up. Denim trousers, hands and knees, watch your step. Go!
Broom-heads leaving flour tracks. You can hear it. Competition, who can collect the most.
I'm not picking for them, I'm picking for us. Us is expansive, expensive. Yaki premium. Now.
Distance speaks towards motion, motion moves towards proximity, proximity asks why, here?
Separation ask for proximity, proximity moves towards motion, motion is a gesture of movement that speaks a language presented over a distance. You're not suppose to be here. Queering images that we see or choose to see and how they function from place to place, over distances, through barriers.
I'm not picking for them, I'm picking for us. Clothes line, hanging. Watch them dry, watch them die.
Black tissue paper covering building blocks. Cardboard on the front line. When you hear the fireworks cracking beneath your feet on an bustling Sunday in LA, Get ready.