OPEN STUDIOS | Curated by Empress Wu

*In the event that advance tickets for this program are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 7PM. We always do our best to get everyone inside comfortably!

Multidisciplinary provocateur Empress Wu guest curates OPEN STUDIOS, inviting multimedia artists XSCN, Jessica Perez, and Melanie Hoff to share works in development. Guided by her own desires/dilemmas in both personal and professional leathersex, Wu is interested in uncovering how each artist explores confrontation, power, and personae in the ultimate sadomasochistic dynamic--the one we perform with ourselves.

PROGRAM

XSCN: (sketch for) trannymeatnoiseholeritualmachine

Staging a duet collision between her performer-body and a mixer-loudspeaker unit, XSCN’s trannymeatnoiseholeritualmachine is a movement performance-in-progress that activates thrashing and unruly loops between skin, resonating folds of flesh, and live electronic sound. It is a reverie working through the ambivalent spectacle of the tranny body, the sexual labor-power of wet orifices, and extreme amplification as a strategy of impoverished rage and counter-attack. What results, even in this sketch, is a time-and-site-specific score in the break between guttural sound and gestural movement, meant to resonate and revulse through spectators' bodies in a circuit of endurance, density, and submission.

Jessica Perez: Unblinking Interior

Born out of the isolation of the pandemic, this work weaves together journal/ing, audio diaries, documentary traces, and performance video. Through these intersecting mediums, personal narrative becomes both archive and performance, an ongoing dialogue between reflection and embodiment. The video anchors this exploration in an unfixed temporality, where emotion and time move in partnership. The intention of the above is a meditation on intimacy, memory, and the shifting borders between the private and the performed self. This piece is an exploration of the cannibalistic nature of the self that wants and needs and the self that protects and serves, between vulnerability and self-preservation.

Melanie Hoff: Sex is the World Our Desires Produce

“Sex is the World Our Desires Produce is a meditative and embodied performance by Melanie Hoff that explores the materiality of conception through language, technology, sound, and breath. At its core, the piece transfigures the sex act into a generative, expansive gesture—one that operates not solely at the scale of the body but radiates fractally into systems of caregiving, social reproduction, and imaginative transformation.

Using a rope wand shaped in an inverted triangle, Hoff dips it into a bowl of consumer-grade soap and, through a dance of breath and gesture, coaxes iridescent bubbles into being. Crawling beneath and blowing into these delicate forms, they suspend the immaterial in spatial tension, transforming the ephemeral into image-scapes that float, collapse, and renew. The act is cyclical: collect, contract, expand, dissolve.

Between these choreographies, poetic meditations surface—on the void, the body, and the infrastructural systems that scaffold intimacy and survival. The performance becomes a kind of inversion, where the internal is turned outward, where breath gives architecture to desire, and where the self dissolves into the swell of atmosphere, technology, and collective dreaming. Hoff’s work reveals how sex, as both act and idea, bursts the body and remakes the world.”-aristilde kirby

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Empress Wu (all pronouns) is a professional dominatrix and cultural activist practicing in NYC and beyond. Their work explores the performance of intimacy, through digital landscapes, queer SM, sexual labor, ancestral ritual, conflict and more. Her work in all its forms have been seen at MoMA PS1, the Performa Biennial, Brown University and probably a dungeon near you. She lives digitally at empresswu.net and mjtom.work

XSCN [pron. “scission”] is a performance and audio-video artist, writer, archivist, and DIY organizer from New York, by way of Ecuador and Romania. Her work deploys modes of confrontational endurance, sensual excess, and violent disharmony, often through the use of her own flesh, in scenes/studies for rites of self-abjection, antagonistic terror, social fracture and anarchic schism.

She currently works on the ongoing cultural project "Untitled [TRANNY]," which spans BDSM endurance performance, exploitation filmmaking, electronic noise music, and experimental cultural analysis to ecstatically embody a ghostly figure called “the Tranny” — a myth, ritual icon, weapon, and narrative form for the distinct material experience of being/surviving/dying as a racialized transsexual hooker.

Jessica Perez is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, performance artist, and writer whose work examines what it means to be working-class and haunted. Approaching film as visual poetry, she crafts montage-driven works that expose the uncanny within the familiar. Through found objects, performance, and experimental editing, Perez tells the story of place and class with forceful intimacy. Her films draw audiences into recognizable spaces and symbols, then subtly distort them to reveal latent horror and social implication. Rooted in poetry and performance, her practice combines political insight with a visceral sense of haunting and revelation.

Melanie Hoff is an artist, educator, technologist, and organizer working within spaces of hacking and performance. Their work cultivates spaces of learning and collective reflection grounded in poetry and reconciliation for how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. At the core of their practice is an interrogation of intersecting systems of classification and power alongside a dedication to acts of repair and reimagining. Melanie teaches about art, sex, technology, design, and social cybernetics at Harvard, NYU, and Yale. Their work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, and elsewhere. They co-direct Hex House, an artist's space they co-founded in Brooklyn, and formerly co-directed the School for Poetic Computation where they can often be found teaching from the edges of their research and experimentation.

OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.