KENDRA WARE
Artist-in-Residence
October 9-23, 2020
This season, AUTOMATA is hosting a series of individual artist’s residencies—a program we launched to serve creative process and new work development in the field of puppetry and object performance, while we are unable to gather for events. Each Resident Artist has 24 hour access to the full space, allowing for uninterrupted work-time and focus.
Resident Artist KENDRA WARE has been conducting a series of performance experiments that play with themes of invisibility in efforts to explore insidious internalizations of systemic dynamics that continue to support societal, cultural, and spiritual imbalance. Using, “Art as healing,” as a catalyst, she aims to combine ASMR techniques, pleasure-seeking, bread making, and breathwork to perform expressions of contemporary internalized effects of historic colonialism. Through the use of tactile elements such as flour and water and silhouette projection, Ware aims to experiment with ways in which to animate the body through performance experimentations.
From the artist:
"I compose text, sound, and objects for unconventional staged environments. My work fuses age-old ritual theatrics with butoh and other experimental performance concepts to explore the intersections of race, gender, class, cultural politics and identity. I am interested in crafting and intoning stories still unearthed. Highly emotional stories that are at times haunting and dark but always steeped in past/present research that explores the feminist or queer voice, both public and private and the perceptions preconceived/established of people of color as a way of contextualizing societal themes of otherness. Although I work independently, my work is collaborative. Often the audience is invited to engage in unique ways in attempts at fostering new forms of participatory communication."
To view Kendra Ware's Performance Experiment #1, developed during her Automata residency, click HERE
(mature audiences only)
Performance Experiment #1 of 3 (3 minutes)
Created and Performed by Kendra Ware
With animation and video experiments by Nicole Emmons
About The Artists:
Kendra Ware is a performance-based multidisciplinary artist who writes and directs. She oftentimes fuses puppetry, video, music, text, and spoken word poetry as a way of critiquing existing societal norms and challenge the notion of otherness. Her work explores the intersections of race, gender, class, cultural politics, and identity. She has presented work as a director at Cara Mia Theater, Dallas, TX, Borderlands Theater, Tuscon, AZ, Perryville Women’s Prison, Book Fairs - San Antonio, NELAC, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Son Of Semele, The Santa Barbara Contemporary Museum of Art, The Last Bookstore, La Mama Theater, The Flea Theater, Pan Asian Theater in New York City and various site-specific locations. She has been a guest artist with the La Mama Umbria Theater, Long Beach Dance Foundation, Indy Convergence Indianapolis, York University, Northwestern and CALARTS, ASU and the University of Arizona.
Nicole Emmons is a filmmaker and mixed media/ installation artist specializing in stop motion animation from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She received her MFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts School of Film and Video as a Jacob K. Javits Fellow, and her Bachelors in Animation and Film from Columbia College Chicago. She is a dual citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and the United States. Her short films have screened in film festivals nationally and internationally. Her work can be seen on network, streaming, and web formats in series, music videos, feature films, and commercials. She works professionally as a director/ animator / artist / educator. She is a member of the international Bodewadmi Kwe Arts and Crafts Collective, the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition, and the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Women's Drum.
And join us for a FB Live event!
KENDRA WARE: PERFORMANCE EXPERIMENTS
Wednesday October 28, 2020 from 3 PM to 4 PM PDT
For more information or to join the event, please click HERE
For this event, Kendra will be speaking live with filmmaker and mixed media/installation artist Nicole Emmons as they watch their collaborative work from Kendra's residency together in real time with the public.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The 2020 Automata Residency Project is made possible with generous support fromThe Jim Henson Foundationand theLA Arts Covid-19 Relief Fund,funded by the J.Paul Getty Trust in partnership with the California Community Foundation. Our Residency Projects are also funded, in part, through the ongoing support of the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs and the LA County Arts Commission.