User Error: A Night of Performance Art

User Error: A Night of Performance Art featuring Quinn Dukes, Kris Grey, Natalie Brewster Nguyen, Molly Jo Shea,
Nathaniel Sullivan
Friday, March 2, 7PM-10PM
$10 includes one free drink

MOCA Tucson presents an evening of performance art from artists across the United States. Ranging from the absurd to the esoteric, from vignettes to more durational work, this event will provide an overview of the practices of some of the top contemporary performance artists working today.

Featuring: Quinn Dukes, Kris Grey, Natalie Brewster Nguyen, Molly Jo Shea, Nathaniel Sullivan

QUINN DUKES is a multimedia performance artist, activist, and curator based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work addresses human connection, social injustice, and ritual. In 2014, Dukes founded Performance is Alive, a website and curatorial project devoted exclusively to performance. She is a tireless advocate for performance art and higher education via appointments at Grace Exhibition Space, the School of Visual Arts, and Satellite Art Show.

For this event, Quinn will perform “Untitled (Sensing)” about her 2017 assault in an act of engaging and healing with the community.

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KRIS GREY is an NYC-based gender-queer artist whose cultural work includes curatorial projects, performance, writing, and studio production. Grey earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Ohio University. In addition to their individual practice, Grey collaborates with Maya Ciarrocchi under the moniker Gender/Power. Grey is current artist-in-resident at MOCA Tucson.

Grey will perform “Untitled”, a live performance that demonstrates a cyclical, ongoing transition presenting the flesh as a malleable object subject to change.

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NATALIE BREWSTER NGUYEN is a multi-disciplinary performance artist, writer, actor, movement artist, educator, and musician. She is passionate about social justice, community living, acroyoga, slacklining, humor, and radical co-parenting. She currently collaborates with Cirque Roots, La Pocha Nostra, Borderlands Theater, New ARTiculations Dance, and TapRoot Productions.

For this event, Natalie will present the following two works:

1) Love Letters Leave No Trace (an interactive installation)
This lifelong collaboration between the artist and her daughter Sula explores the emotional, environmental, and psychological impact of human celebration.

2) Tasty Asian Foxes is a live, roaming installation created by Natalie Brewster Nguyen and Serena Tang. The performers are shapeshifters, foxes, poets, acrobats, painters, waitresses.

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MOLLY JO SHEA is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on performance, object-making and interactive experiences. Her work is a combination of decadence and horror, creating environments and characters that pervert the familiar and provide new experiences for community engagement. She is currently pursuing her MFA at CalArts. For this performance, Shea will train recently defrosted cryonically frozen people how to adjust to life being just a head.

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NATHANIEL SULLIVAN is a creative non-fiction artist. His research into the lives of real people and events combine documentary realism and rational processes with conjecture and desire. He makes videos and multimedia lecture performances that blur the line between subject and performer. He has created performances and videos about former French president Francois Mitterand’s last meal and basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain’s sex life. He has shown his work at galleries and museums across the U.S. and Europe; his performance work has been written about on Hyperallergic and an 11-page spread of his latest work was featured in Vice.

For this performance, Sullivan will perform “While The Nation Went Bankrupt”, a multimedia performance lecture that tells the story of the financial crisis through the fictional love letters of JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. The performance is in part an alternative and more libidinal history of our current financial crisis, and an exploration of the metaphoric creep of the neoliberal ideology into all areas of life. Not quite fiction and not quite satire, the letters are a cry in the dark from an insular world that brought us all to the brink of financial, physical, and moral ruin.