Citizen Rahne Alexander is a writer & performing artist from Baltimore. She has been
involved with Transmodern in various roles every year since its inception. A core member
of Baltimore’s award-winning queer cabaret, the Charm City Kitty Club, Rahne has performed across the US, both as a solo performer and with her all-female garage band, The Degenerettes. www.rahne.com
Andrea Shearer is an accomplished musician with 4 album credits plus a bucket full of 7″ and compilation releases. She is currently drumming with Pariah Piranha (Queer Control Records), and is a guest drummer for Brooklyn-based pop duo NA+AN. Pariah Piranha’s second album “Animus Unanimous” is in production.
Kristen Anchor is a Baltimore video artist and musician. Her goofy, political videos have screened all over the U.S. and appeared on several independent film compilations. She’s the drummer for The Degenerettes, Baltimore’s all-girl underground garage group.
Project Name: Monster Drummer Thunderupagus
Project Description: Monster Drummer Thunderupagus is an unlikely untenably metal-head drummer from another dimension. Thunderupagus is not cute; it is fierce, jamming on its sweet fifteen-piece monster drum kit. Thunderupagus will be on Earth for one show only, Sunday, Apr 6th for Pedestrian Service Exquisite.
Brooklyn-based artist may be best known for her musical theatrics with band the Tuna Helpers described this way by Westword in Denver, Colorado: “Operatic, piano-anchored spells of art rock that imagine Azure Ray taking up residence in a Neil Gaiman graphic novel: all mystery, melody and magic.”
Adrienne also creates maniacal, frenzied performance art addressing topics such as zombies, brains, love, lesbian sex, and more. Her amazing, edgy work continues to dazzle audiences across the US.
“Though Adrienne may race around stage, kicking and screaming, her piercing eyes bulging out of her head as she releases a glorious yowl, you’d somehow feel at ease leaving her with your children.” — Bitch Magazine
David James Armacost and April Danielle Lewis met in 2006. Since then they’ve exhibited their artwork and curated shows in Baltimore, at Large Glass Project Space; Sub-Basement Gallery, and Spin Alternative Art Space ; in Annapolis, at the Maryland Federation of Art ; in Wilmington DE, at the Lo-Fi Gallery; and at the University of Delaware. Armacost, who received his BFA from the Corcoran College of Art in 2002, is a native resident of Baltimore Lewis recently earned an AA in visual art from Anne Arundel Community College and is pursuing her BFA in printmaking at Towson University. By subscribing to contemporary art on a local, regional, and national level, David James and April Danielle both remain committed to enriching the arts in Baltimore.
Project Name: Spring Promenade 2008
Project Description: A passerby encounters the ’surreal moment’ of a red carpet photo shoot-everyone is encouraged to participate, either stand in front of the logos, or take pictures. Professional photographers will also be photographing whoever is in the photographic area. The bright colors and flashing strobe lights will capture the attention and imagination of all those nearby.
Peter Barrickman is an artist working in Milwaukee. His videos, sculptures and paintings have been shown in the United States, Mexico and Europe. He studied at The Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College, NY.
Performing with: EPHKLATCHEMERAL
Kelley Bell is an Artist, Animator, Designer and dilettante extraordinaire living and working in Baltimore city.
Project Name: Hydra
Project Description: A very large talking monster: when one addresses the Hydra through a microphone, it repeats what you said back to you: although each of the Hydra’s nine heads regurgitates your speech in a different distorted way. The hydra says a lot of things all at once; each of its heads has its own nuances, its own way of speaking, in an effort to please everyone. A hydra does not lie, but the truth that emerges from the Hydra’s lips is a definite departure from the original.
Lauren Bender: 5′0″, 110 lbs, Baltimore. Editor, SUCCESS! @ narrowhouserecordings.com. Feminine Arbiter of Phrases, Performance Thanatology Research Society.
Kevin Blechdom, born Kristin Erickson, is an experimental electronic musician/performance artist from San Francisco, California. She attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where she founded Blectum from Blechdom with Blevin Blectum, an experimental electronic group. In 2001, Blectum From Blechdom won an Award of Distinction for digital music at the Prix Ars Electronica.
Kevin also played in an art-rock band, Adult Rodeo, with her brother lumberob, a.k.a. Rob Erickson, and his wife mephany stankins. They released records on Shimmy Disc and Four States Fair.
Kevin Blechdom continues to pursue a solo project. Her latest album, called Eat My Heart Out, was released June 2005, on Chicks on Speed Records. Featured a short 13-minute musical movie called Countdown to Nothing, a collaboration with Lucile Desamory.
Despite her typically masculine first name, she is female.
Andrea Bocchio is a Peruvian artist, graduating from MICA in May with a degree in Fiber and Art History. She studied Fashion Knitwear in London and has been working in knit and print fashion collections. She is interested in the cycle of luxury, the real and the counterfeit, roles of bodies and identity in fashion.
Project Name: Andrea Bocchio for Louis Vuitton
Project Description: Bocchio has created this 18 look collection based on fake Louis Vuitton bags and her re-interpretation of the classic monogram LV fabric. All the looks also feature fur head dresses that veil the identity of the models. For this festival, she was inspired by the idea of the tableau with models posing in a space and interacting with props to create a narrative and a guerrilla fashion show where high fashion can be brought back to the streets, the original source of the fakes. Moving luxury from the elite to the masses is paramount for Bocchio’s work, bringing the cycle of luxury full circle.
Blevin Blectum is an electronic musician. Recently relocated from the industrial armpit of Oakland, California, to the humid lovecraftian greenery of Providence, Rhode Island, Blevin releases her soon to be classic fourth solo album, GULAR FLUTTER, on an unsuspecting public via the AAGOO label (New York). Blevin is alternately known as one half of the recently reformed and reunited groundbreaking digital duo Blectum From Blechdom, recipients of the 2001 Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in Digital Musics (for their album “The Messy Jesse Fiesta”). Blevin moonlights with audio/video band SAGAN alongside her husband and fellow e-musician Lesser, keyboardist Wobbly, and video artiste enfant terrible Ryan Junell. SAGAN released their debut CD/DVD, “Unseen Forces” on the Vague Terrain label (Matmos’ vanity label) in 2004, and followed it up with limited edition green vinyl 7″ and mini-CD on Oakland’s 333 label (the ‘Resting Pleasures’ EP, 2006). http://blevin.lsr1.com/
Blevin produces continued electronics with a more oblique slant on the basic BFB sensation of things-not-quite-right-here, clanking, creaking grooves and anti-grooves as a coal-powered spacecraft from some steampunk parallel universe potentiality, puffing and straining as it struggles to reach escape velocity, chopped, noise-reduced and timed/stretched to the breaking/boiling point, generally fucked-with samples of everything from hand-slapped rain-drenched leaves in courtship gardens and antique broken Beatnik banks to ProTooledFree classic utterly danceable disembodied-blissful-transvestite-stand-up-comic vocals.
Blevin holds degrees in music from Oberlin Conservatory (B.A., Ohio, USA) and Mills College (M.F.A., California, USA). She was the recipient of a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California. She has toured extensively through the United States and Europe since 1998. In 1999 she was the winner of the 1999 New Langton Arts Music award for her first solo CD “Pirate Planets” on the Phthalo label out of Los Angeles. Her second and third albums, “Talon Slalom” (2004) on Deluxe Records, and “Magic Maple” (2006) on the Praemedia label, were greeted with much critical acclaim.
photo credit: Vinciane Verguethen
Alessandro Bosetti is a composer and sound artist working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcastings and published recordings. In his work he moves across the line between sound anthropology and composition, often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations. In 2006 he\’s been living and working in West Africa, China, Taiwan, Holland, Scandinavia, United States , Germany and Italy.
Project Name: I am still asleep
Project Description: It takes place in a hotel room and in a bathroom. In the hotel room Bosetti is in the bed, still asleep or sort of and dreaming.
Hannah Brancato is an artist and textile designer who researches how lifestyle is affected by décor. A graduate from the Fiber Department at the MICA, she is based in Baltimore, where her work is currently on view at the Pinkard Gallery. She is the founder of The Doll Project at the House of Ruth and was co-curator of Made Home at the Current Gallery.
Alison Mazur is an artist whose work explores the dynamics of imagery and material to better understand the pursuit of happiness. Her work yields a positive recollection, approaching various mediums in a manner that places less significance on symbolic content, and more emphasis on stimulating a collective pleasure.
Project Name: Curtain Walk
Project Description: Passersby’s will be confronted by a maze of printed silk and woven industrial textiles in the alley way behind Load of Fun. The manipulated space will redefine the everyday experience of the otherwise neglected aesthetics of North Howard Street. Our interests are in creating a communal installation that is made functional by stimulating pleasure and initiating interaction.
