For OPEN STUDIOS, poet and Executive Director of The Poetry Project, guest curator Kyle Dacuyan brings together Lucas de Lima, Kamikaze Jones, and Riven Ratanavanh with Demetris Charalambous – a group of artists who roll around textually and gesturally in disobedience, risk, excess, and disarray – to share works-in-progress. Interested in speech and movement behaving against functional expectation and decorum, Dacuyan asks: What do impulse, pleasure, and intuition open; what do order, legibility, and requirement foreclose? When we let go of those mantles, the stakes become higher, hotter, more vivid and true.

Lucas de Lima shares their work Cosmic Bottom, a ritual of rebirth and permeability in which liberation begins inside oneself and grows outwards.

Kamikaze Jones recontextualizes an earlier work, A Storm In Every Port, which troubles the multivalent archetypes of the sailor: as a pornographic stock character, as a vessel of colonial extraction, as an innately subordinate entity, and as a fraught sigil of queer carnality. Marooned on a deserted beach (or perhaps just stuck in a k-hole on Fire Island) the sailor outs himself as a ravenous ghost, an insatiable cumdump, and eventually, as a washed up siren who sings himself to proverbial shipwreck.

Created alongside collaborator Demetris Charalambous, Riven Ratanavan’s The Edge of Desire Has a Way of Curving is a vignette that questions the thresholds of effability, intimacy, and possibility. Drawing from personal experiences of cruising, fisting, and p̶a̶s̶s̶i̶n̶g̶, this new work-in-progress paints a portrait of power, agony, loss, and illumination through desire, and a queer yearning to reach into the unknown.

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.

OPEN STUDIOS | Curated by Kyle Dacuyan