Pseuda

About This Artist

Nicholas Navarro is a multimedia performance artist based in San Francisco, performing under the stage name Pseuda. Using queer nightlife aesthetics, practical special effects, technology and drag performance structure as devices, they create emotionally charged images that build to sublime climax. Their work is grounded in empathy with the characters they embody, using these antiheroes as avatars to explore identity, otherness and to create space for mutual catharsis with performer and audience. They are ⅓ of avant-drag performance art trio, Toxic Waste Face, who have performed nationally and abroad.

Kim Ip is a Queer/Asian/Femme Bay Area Choreographer and Movement Artist. She received a Bachelor’s Degree in Dance from Mills College in 2014. She has collaborated with STEAMROLLER, InkBoat, Chris Black Dance, Molissa Fenley, & Toxic Waste Face. She has completed residencies at B4BEL4B Gallery, SAFEhouse, Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, & CounterPulse. Her dance aesthetic is influenced by music video vixens, femme fatales, release technique, & Avant-Garde Japanese Dance. Her drive to make work comes from a desire to confront her Asian American identity by physicalising sensual movement, showing pleasure, & discussing what defines sexual expression in the greater Asian community.

Taurin Barrera is an electronic musician, interactive multimedia artist, and teacher based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work utilizes creative technologies to explore the liminal space between sensation and perception, and to augment our experience of sound, light, and space. He integrates spatial audio, visual music, and electroacoustic composition techniques to program custom software instruments, performance systems, and immersive installations. He holds a BA in Philosophy and Hispanic Studies from the College of William and Mary, and an MFA in Electronic Music & Recording Media from Mills College. He is currently Director of Technology and Applied Composition Studios at San Francisco Conservatory of Music. 

Gabriel Christian (they/them) is a BlaQ American artist bred in New York City (Wappinger Lenape land) & baking in Oakland (Chochenyo Ohlone land). For more than ten years, their work has metabolized the vernaculars inherent to BlaQ diaspora—futurity, fluidity, and faggotry—through high dramatics, structured improvisation, poetics & collaborative practices. They are often hosting micro-projects and attempting digital interventionism through their social media IG: @doom_body.

Erin Yen shares a personal practice which investigates self and ‘other’ (in a growing age of technology.) She holds a BFA from The Ohio State University, where she became fluent with Laban’s Systems of Movement Analysis. She was the first to use Labanotation to document Doug Varone’s work, Possession (’94.) Erin has danced with companies such as Alvin Ailey and BalletMet, and she has performed works by artists Ohad Naharin, Bebe Miller, and Johannes Weiland.

sibling hart, called gin by most, is a once & future clown living on Huichin Ohlone land. They daylight as a puller-of-weeds, nightlight as a poet, and organize with the Anti Police-Terror Project in varying hours of light. They edit the journal Dirt Child with writing partner/cofounder, mal young.

About this Project

are:era is a speculative science fiction allegory examining the complexity and multiplicity of our shifting identities as they loop and reflect back to us endlessly. Posing a question about the origins and future of those born into a cyber age, living their lives through a screen, as well as the implications of our ever growing techno-voyeurism.

Directed by drag performance artist, Pseuda, and choreographed by Kim Ip, in collaboration with interactive multimedia artist, Taurin Barerra, are:era drops its audience into a microcosm of a dystopian machinescape. A technological apparatus in which a performer is confined to a panopticon of cameras and monitors. In this space, organic movement is but an echo of the past, remembered through the flicker of screens. Will our protagonist assert their will and wildness through the barrage of data and images? Or find themselves a mimic, bound to the same patterns ad infinitum. What channels are we tuned into? Who is watching us, or who do we think is watching us? What effect does this have on the moves we think we are consciously making?

Square artist photo: Pseuda at Pro Arts Gallery; Photo by Becca Reilly.
Banner photo: Pseuda at Stereo Argento at The Stud; Photo by Cabure A Bonugli