Spoon Popkin - Friday January 13, 2007
Spoon Popkin received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and has studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts, the Glasgow School of Art and the Chautauqua Institute for Performing Arts. Solo exhibitions include Goucher College (Baltimore, MD), The Lee Nagrin Workshop (NY, NY), The Kunstlerhaus (Salzburg, Austria), RGB Gallery (NY, NY), The Garfield Artworks (Pittsburgh, PA) and the International Festival of Women in the Arts (Glasgow, Scotland). She has had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Kunstlerhaus in Salzburg, Austria and was a finalist for The Bellagio Center. She has received awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the CityArts Individual Artist Award in Visual Arts. Her work has taken her to India, the UK, Panama, Mexico,Turkey, Greece and throughout Europe.
Valeska is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, and holds degrees in fine arts and art education. Since arriving in Baltimore, Valeska has been an active member of the Baltimore arts community, performing original puppetry productions, participating as a stiltwalker in parades, exhibiting her work in galleries, and teaching arts workshops to kids and adults at public schools, craft schools and museums. The Cause Company is a pseudonym used for the various aspects of her artistic practice.
Trained in the art of hypnotherapy Carly Ptak has a way of getting into your head and sometimes into your heart or even to your stomach. She loves to ferment both ideas and home brews until they are tangy and bubbly and healthy too. Every performance is predictably unpredictable except for the one thing you can be sure of: it comes from a place of love and a desire to create more of it in the world.
DJ Rapid Fire is one of San Francisco’s most adored, and in demand, queer female DJs. Her original style mixes disco, 90s hi-nrg, hip-hop, electronic and dance-pop and continuously sets nightlife trends. Rapid Fire is one of the co-creators and resident DJs of Stay Gold, San Francisco’s favorite dirty queer dance party, as well as resident DJ at Sucker Punch, the city’s popular Monday night hot spot. This fierce femme has heads turning, booties shaking and dance floors begging for more.
Tyson Reeder was born in 1974 in Fairfax, VA and currently lives and works in Milwaukee, WI. He holds a B.A. from Montana State University and a B.F.A. from the University of Minnesota. Additional education experience includes the Art Center College of Art and Design M.F.A. Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Right-Geist Connections, Ltd. is the result of a merger/mutually hostile takeover™ between New Jersey-based members of two international artists’ collectives, the Meme Rider Media Team and the Post-NeoAbsurdist Anti-Collective. Participating members include (but are not limited to) Warren Fry and Olchar E. Lindsann of Post-Neo, and Nathan Shafer and Joelle Howald of the Meme-Riders.
Adam Robinson is a writer and musician who lives in Baltimore, MD and works as a technology buyer in the financial industry. He is the founder of the chapbook press Publishing Genius, an editor for the literary journal JMWW, and his poems have appeared in several journals and on numerous stages. He has written a dozen or so articles about Christian rock bands for HM Magazine, and his feature-length slasher-play, The Professor , was staged in Milwaukee in 2005. At the third Transmodern Festival he performed an HL Mencken bioperetta as cARDINAL, which also features Stephanie Barber. Adam currently plays bass in Baltimore’s newest What-Is-It, Hexie Johnson.
Jinnene Ross is a performer, installation artist and costume designer who currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She has performed collaboratively in several art spaces both locally in Milwaukee at Darling Hall, The Marcus Center for the Performing Arts and Hotcakes Gallery, and nationally at Gallapagos in Brooklyn, NY and ArtSpace in Richmond, VA. Her installation work has exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN, Beloit College in Beloit, WI and Alverno College in Milwaukee, WI. She received her BFA at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire, and her MFA from Miami University at Ohio.
Ric Royer is a writer of performances and performer of writings. He wants to talk to you, spin lies both mordant and morbid, and sing songs of hope and disaster. Sometimes he will whisper into your trusting ear, sometimes he will scream in your face.
Randy Russell has produced, acted in, and written for film (American Job, The Pool, Modus Operandi), has written many plays, and has performed in the Milwaukee area, including, with Peter Barrickman, The Spinning Rainbow Ball at The Marcus Center for the Performing Arts. He has owned and operated a punk record store, a zine store, and he invented the Semioabstractique Collage technique. He has recently finished writing a collection of stories called: 9 Lies.
Melissa Scherrer grew up in Milwaukee, WI and attended the Milwaukee High School of the Arts where she studied Theatre Arts and mime. After receiving her BFA from UW-Milwaukee in 1999, she worked collaboratively with Milwaukee artists and performed as a mime in the traveling musical “Chaza Show Choir”. During her MFA studies at the University of Illinois Chicago she created a body of photographs narrating her experience of the Midwest landscape. In Chicago she also ran a small gallery out of her living room called “The Greenhouse”. Scherrer now lives in Brooklyn, NY with artist Mike Pare and teaches art and design. Her work has been exhibited at several museums and galleries in the United States and is part of the permanent collection at The Ulrich Contemporary Museum of Art. Currently she writes, makes videos, and takes photographs of the spiritual geography of towns in America. Her latest video piece, Genesis, can be seen at 
Smelling Salt Amusements is Heather Romney and Peter Redgrave. They are educators by trade and entertainers by whim. Please visit 
SHUA GROUP is a New York/New Jersey based performance company and not for profit organization directed by choreographer Joshua Bisset and artist Laura Quattrocchi. Shua Group is committed to broadening the interface of movement based art and public life. 2008 projects include a mass performance opposite ground zero at the World Financial Center (May) and the development of a physical installation on the sides of Federal Hill Baltimore (Fall) through the American Visionary Arts Museum. (Please contact 
Snacks are Dan Breen and Tom Boram. we built the south beach audio to light modulator but it kept breaking, probably ’cause the integrated circuits were shit. the optocouplers went shit. when it was working it was beautiful. we’d have an invisible kick drum driving a green incandescent right under dan’s drum stool. dan’s snare mic would be driving a blob of blue christmas lights wrapped in 12 feet of saran. tom’s left out would be a randomized patch blinking like a psychopath’s naked pendulous kitchen bulb. tom’s right out would split in the signal multiple made out of an anchovy tin, then one going to the amp, the other driving a blacklight fluorescing a gin and tonic with marshmallows in it.
Straight Punch to the Crotch is a synth-folk-pop band that is slashing and burning the rock-forest of Virginia. Straight Punch to the Crotch hits you where it counts, and you like it. Get ready to feel the love, as we summon the powers of earth, wind, fire and, most importantly, heart.
The Theft and Rescue Society: Daniel Huyberts, Michael Ries, and Dana Solano was formed in 2006 by interactive media artists Daniel Huyberts and Dana Solano. The Society held their first event in Baltimore, Maryland in December of 2006. Since that time, the group has expanded to include fellow interactive media artist Michael Ries and the group has participated in a number of festivals including the Conflux Festival in Brooklyn and the Enzimi Festival in Rome.
The Tingle Troupe happened when Sarah Buccheri, Theresa Columbus, Kimberly Miller, and Jinnene Ross began regularly emceeing the Tingle Showcase, an unbelievably great performance art showcase in Milwaukee, WI. Working collaboratively and individually, the troupe produced their own dramatic or poetically comical pieces, which they performed at Darling Hall, the Marcus Center for the Arts Performance Showcase, and on an east coast tour where unsuspecting audiences were filled with delight.
Renato Umali has born in Manila, Philippines and grew up in Jersey City, NJ. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Northwestern University, and received an MFA in Film and Video Performance from UW-Milwaukee. Much of his current work is derived in some way or another from data about his life, which collects and stores in various spread sheets. His work takes form in videos and performances. He teaches in the UW-Milwaukee Film Department, and maintains a piano studio for private instruction.
Daniel Van Allen has been creating a visionary environment in Baltimore since 1980. He has been driving an art car since 1976. Van Allen has operated his own furniture restoration business for 35 years. He is the founder and organizer of the Intertribal Powwow (an annual cultural expo) and The Arabber Preservation Society (for our horse cart vendors); Dan directed The Sowebo Arts Festival for 6 years and helps organize several art organizations around town. His work includes multimedia art and architecture documentation, installation; mixed media, found object and wood sculpture; painting and performance.
Virginia Warwick describes herself mainly as a sculptor while also incorporating performance, sound, and installations into her work. Born in 1982, She spent the majority of her childhood in Frederick, Maryland where she grew up on two and a half acres of land. She grew to love wild life and animals which has influenced the subject choices in her artwork. She is currently in graduate school at the Rinehart School of Sculpture and is scheduled to graduate in May of 2008. This past year she has shown in the Artscape Outdoor Sculpture Competition, hosted the Underwater Adventure 2007 at Load of Fun Studios, and is scheduled to show at the Arlington Arts Center in the fall of 2008.
Kathryn Williamson believes an artwork should never reveal all to the viewer, some things should be left unsaid. This gives the viewer the opportunity to be active; the chance to think for themselves and later contemplate what they experienced.
Erin Womack is perpetually seeking an entryway into outer space — via printed matter, the moving image, and other methods much simpler than astronautics. Although born of this planet, her spirituality and creative energy remain rooted in a distant astral plane. She is a 2007 graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, and has since bided time at Brooklyn publisher, Picturebox Inc. The Force propels her forward as she continues her humble quest.
(born Glasgow Scotland 1966) Dirty moments/foul ameliorations, the ‘got wrong’ and other things. Gillian Wylde is an artist working with video performance activities, installation and object. A mongrel little cur practice alluding to instances appropriated from the unpopular popular, the extraordinary everyday and high vs. low art. Comedy + trauma = traumedy as a rupture in aesthetics + little investigations/big ideas of the pathetic, poetics + shoddiness. Temporalities and timing vs the rubbishy/crappy within the composite live or mediated moment like maybe a rude smell or hairy logic. Recent work includes; 2007 “Wintry” group show, Lounge Gallery London. 2007 Rules and Regs -commission South Hill Park Bracknell-’practice-led development platform supporting 4 commissioned artists to create new work in response to rules that challenge habits and stimulate creativity’ 2006 Taoh Residency Stavanger City Norway- “is kylling bogg bogg” series of video works and installation which emerged out of a 3 week residency in Stavanger City Lounge Gallery London, Midlands Art Centre Birmingham. ‘the story of my object (turdus merula merula)’ Video installation- the work developed out of an uncanny encounter with a real living blackbird and considers the uneasy and unromantic attitudes towards a bucolic and ‘abjected’ sublime nature” Gillian Wylde is currently a Senior Lecturer in Art at Dartington College of Art. 
Shannon Young is a multi-media artist that lives and works in Baltimore. She received and MFA in painting from American University and will be graduating from Imaging Media and Digital Arts program at UMBC. Shannon has exhibited at Maryland Art Place in Baltimore, The Warehouse in Washington DC and 1708 Gallery in Richmond VA. 
