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Rex Renee Leonowicz
August 23, 2017 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm UTC+0
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Rex Renee Leonowicz to the store to perform from when there is no one and there is everyone, on Wednesday, August 23rd at 7:00 pm.
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE: The multimedia performance acts as a touring funeral party, using drag, poetry, music, and visual art/digital media to create a kind of live memorial/archive that animates the book and brings its story to life to chart the personal, political, and cultural moments that are living, dying, and rebirthing in the book. Rex will perform poems from the book and drag versions of songs that influence the text. A video collage of drawings, art maps, and photos will stream in the background, along with a soundtrack of music that influenced the work. The point of the music, visual art, maps, and ephemera interspliced is to pay homage to the events, people, and sites of protest, grief, and triumph present in the work, as well as to show evidence of communities that often are invisible or displaced. Part history lesson, part mixtape, part memorial, part celebration, the project blends genres to honor and illuminate resistance movements, our heroes, our experiences, failures & successes in solidarity, art, and community love.
ABOUT THE BOOK: when there is no one and there is everyone is a full-length collection of poetry and illustrations set for release in Summer 2017 by Magic Helicopter Press. The collection is experienced as a collage-like mixtape of techniques, influences, pop references, and city cultures that explores the messiness of identity, relationship, and resistance in an unjust world. Its biggest concern is with landscapes of public and private space, specifically how gentrification and intersecting oppressions play themselves out on the intimate geographies of bodies, minds, and cities Beyond this, it’s a celebration of friendship, freakdom, and what it means when people on the margins come together to rough it out in tough times.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Rex Renee Leonowicz is a multimedia artist, performer, writer, and activist from Queens, New York. As a poor/working class, trans/nonbinary femme, Rex’s art and performance work is grounded in a politics of radical resistance, healing, and witness. Rex is a gender-bending, genre-blending artist whose work critically responds to the relationships people on the margins have with our surroundings and each other. S/he holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Mills College and a B.A. in Gender & Women’s Studies & Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College.