Monique Jenkinson (AKA Fauxnique)
Artist Fellow at the de Young (FEB 15, 2012 – DEC 31, 2012)
Photographer: Daniel Kokin; Pictured: Monique Jenkinson (AKA Fauxnique)
As a de Young Museum 2012 Irvine Fellow, Monique Jenkinson will engage with the museum’s permanent collection and current exhibitions, specifically the textile/fashion collection. She will create performances specifically for the de Young site, branch into video work, and in a September museum studio residency, make a piece to premiere at CounterPULSE in the late Fall.
Engagement Partners:
Media Sponsor:
Instrument (To be performed at CounterPULSE, Fall 2012)
Past CounterPULSE Performances:
Crying in Public, 2007 ARC Residency
Luxury Items, 2010
PAST EVENTS
Making Scenes
APR 27, Friday Night at the de Young
5:00 – 8:45PM
Dance Discourse Project #13
SEP 15, SAT at 2PM
Monique Jenkinson
Monique Jenkinson is a performer and maker of performance whose work moves between genres, but maintains deep roots in dance. Her work explores femininity, glamour and process – drawing on physicality (classical ballet and post-modern improvisation), theatricality (camp, the ridiculous and the absurd), and theory (queer and feminist). She presents her work in theaters, nightclubs and museums, and seeks to explore connections and tensions between art and entertainment.
Jenkinson emerged out of a feminist, postmodern, improvisational dance and choreographic lineage, but grew toward a tradition of radical queer performance that uses decadence and drag to entertain, transcend and horrify. “Yvonne Rainer said ‘no to spectacle’ so that I could say yes to sequins.” Rather than reject the traditional trappings of performance and the performance of femininity, Jenkinson embraces them. Her practice of feminism celebrates glamorous women as masters of artifice, and her intimacy with both the oppressive and empowering effects of feminine tropes allows her to create a zone of play from which she makes her particular critique.
Since 2003, Jenkinson has been deeply engaged in an ongoing performance project, Fauxnique, her drag queen persona. As a lens through which Jenkinson magnifies her artistic concerns, Fauxnique typifies and expands a particular evolution of drag-based performance that goes beyond camp show-tunes into the realms of punk, horror, high drama, and gender subversion. Her short, sharp, entertaining drag numbers dovetail with her theatrical works by showing the classical rigor and specificity of her movement exploration, and transcending their pop form, with references not only to popular culture, but also to art, history and politics. In this realm, the definition of ‘drag queen’ expands from ‘man as woman’ into another kind of mutable creature, allowing Jenkinson to embody Fauxnique as a clown, monster or diva, but always with an exaggerated sense of glamour and femininity.
Jenkinson engages in constant, critical examination of the intersections and differences between her nightclub-going and theater/dance-based audiences. In all of her work she strives to invite, reveal and communicate: to acknowledge the shared experience between performer and observer.
Monique Jenkinson is a multifaceted artist whose work places itself in the gaps between dance, theater, drag and performance art. She has created and performed internationally and locally at ODC Theater, CounterPULSE, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the de Young Museum, and Trannyshack in San Francisco; the New Museum, Judson Church, Danspace Project, Howl Festival and the legendary Stonewall in New York; the Met Theatre in Los Angeles; the New Orleans Fringe Festival; the Coachella Festival; and in Reykjavik, Amsterdam, Edinburgh and London.
Monique’s drag queen alter ego, Fauxnique, a prolific fixture on the experimental performance scene, made history as the first woman to win San Francisco’s infamous Miss Trannyshack Pageant and was named ‘Best Drag Act’ (2009) in the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay Readers’ Poll. She also appears in the documentary Filthy Gorgeous: the Trannyshack Story and the April/May ’08 issue of Bust magazine.
Notable projects and accolades include: a de Young Museum Irvine Fellowship for 2012, two successful solo shows (Faux Real, which played in New York and London after a sold-out San Francisco run, and Luxury Items, which culminated to acclaim at CounterPULSE after a sold out premiere at ODC Theater), playing the DIRT (a role originated by Justin Bond) in Taylor Mac’s Lily’s Revenge at the Magic Theater and originating the eponymous role in Silver for Gold: the Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick by David J. (of Bauhaus and Love & Rockets fame), visual art exhibitions Scores (Lawrimore Project, Seattle) and Presence (Torrance Art Museum), Truly Madly Deeply at the Movement Research Festival in New York, vocals and video for the club dance track ‘Lipstique,’ a Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery (GOLDIE) Award for Performance, SF Weekly’s ‘Best Performance Artist 2010,’ and 7X7 Magazine’s ‘Hot 20 Under 40.’
Monique spent five years as co-director (with actor Kevin Clarke) of the performance duo Hagen & Simone, is a past artist-in-residence at ODC Theater and CounterPULSE, and a 2007 recipient (with mentor Keith Hennessey) of the CHIME Grant. Her solo and collaborative work has also received support from the Zellerbach Family Foundation and Theatre Bay Area. She has a B.A. in Dance and Literature from Bennington College.