Words for Falastin: fundraiser for Rafah
2024-03-03 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
With hearts broken and malleable grief we invite you to gather with us as we speak prayers, songs, offerings for the liberation of the land of Palestine. As we tend to this fire and keep the underground waterway open and wide. All funds gathered at this event will be sent directly to our friends and kin in Rafah. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Purchase tickets here!

Donations also accepted at the door (paypal or cash)

Doors open at 2:30pm

Haneen Sabbah Sara AbusheikhDef SoundIsaac Michael Ybarrameital yaniv

Photo by Haneen Sabbah from a recent gathering for Gaza.

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Haneen Sabbah Palestinian peace activist from Gaza, writer, organiser.

@haneen.sabbah

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hi! i’m sara abusheikh, a palestinian based in los angeles. i built my life around garments: the making and altering of them. that’s how i make myself known to (or hide from) most people. but i have a second passion: i am obsessed by trauma and its consequences — both individual and collective. really, i always have been. but, in 2014, i survived a violent crime and a subsequent years-long journey of bargaining with (and being further traumatized by) america’s legal systems. the experience broke and then formed my world view. it led me to create a short-lived podcast on which i interviewed other survivors of sexual violence, and is the subject of a book i’m writing called, you’re supposed to scream fire. the book has been eight years in the making. i only hope it doesn’t take ten.

my work can be found at www.sara-abusheikh.com or at my instagram, @sara.abusheikh

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Def Sound (pronouns they/them/he/hims) is an Afro-Caribbean transdisciplinary artist born and based in South Central LA. Def is a postbinary Grammy Award-considered contemporary hip-hop artist, producer, poet, and award-winning academic. Def is Grammy nominated for their work as a producer on aja monet’s debut album ‘when the poems do what they do’.

Def’s work as a poet has been included in Saul Williams’ Anthology CHORUS, while their music has been featured in LA WEEKLY, LA Record, The L.A. Times, The Frieze Art Fair, the Emmy Nominated Television series Music Diaries, and the Emmy winning Artbound on KCET. Def is currently teaching Hip Hop/Black Critical Theory at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

IG: @def.sound

Website https://defsoundla.com/

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Isaac Michael Ybarra, a visual artist and storyteller, is Tongva, Chumash, and Xicano. Grounded in his ancestral cultivation, he utilizes film, photography, and poetry to amplify decolonization narratives and reclaim Indigenous pedagogies. Through his art, Isaac seeks to challenge the dominance of the human experience and instead honors the interconnectedness of all beings. He embraces the values of Indigenous Futurism to retell the past and present, envisioning a future guided by his community’s stories, visions, and desires.

@ooxono_paar

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meital yaniv (b. 1984, Tel-Aviv, israel) is learning how to be in a human form. they do things with words, with moving and still images, with threads, with bodies in front of bodies, with the Earth. they are a death laborer tending to a prayer for the liberation of the land of Palestine and the lands of our bodies. they keep Fires and submerge themselves in Ocean and Sea Water often. yaniv is learning to listen to the Waters, birdsongs, caretakers, and ancestors as they walk as a guest on the home and gathering place of the Cahuilla-ʔívil̃uwenetem Meytémak, Tongva-Kizh Nation, Luiseño-Payómkawichum, and Serrano-Yuhaaviatam/Maarenga’yam.

yaniv is the author of bloodlines. Theymakeofferings through true name collective.

IG: @bloodlines_book

Springing Studies
2024-03-09 14:00 - 2024-03-23 17:00
Springing Studies is the first installment of HRLA Studies, a series of free study sessions intended for skill sharing, thought provocation, collective learning and expansion of the commons. Two sessions are being offered this Spring. The sessions are free and open to everyone. No RSVP necessary. They take place in parallel to other HRLA programs at HRLA and around the area. HRLA Studies is a proposition instigated by clara lópez menéndez. Because the most memorable things we learn for free, like stolen fruit taste better.

Springing StudiesHosted by Fernando BravoMarch 9, 16, and 232 – 5pm

Human Resources is in an old part of Los Angeles. Between the Elysian Hills and the Zanja Madre, its location tells a story of the place before LA, and it might hint at the after.

At a time where many are asking questions around the nation state: questions of birth, of growth, of progress, Springing Studies brings to you a selection of readings, lectures, and activities that briefly and densely link the natal and the national, the mountain and the tunnel, the mine and the train, industry, progress, globalization, today, right now, the center. A confused center, surrounded by lifedeath substances, like seeds in earth.

Over three Saturdays in March, we will come together to study, draw, and share. We will walk to the Zanja Madre. We will look toward the mountains and wonder, how else? What else and when?

Reading for the first session: A Non-Euclidean View on California as a Cold Place to Be, by Ursula K. LeGuin.

Devotional See-Saw
2024-03-13 00:00 - 2024-03-16 23:59
Gallery hours: Friday, March 15th, 2 – 6pm; Saturday, March 16th 12 – 5pm

A collaborative show by Canción Paz and Amia YokoyamaTo read texts about the show (in English / en español), click here.

A parade with the main material being friendship (sacred relatedness) among ceramics, drawings, bells and fabric dolls.

With pieces (flags) by the sexiest CDMX artists Mata Flores, Ada Navarro, Cheslsea Gelwarg, Helia Mejia, Corona, and Carolina Berrocal; and LA artists Syd Yocom, Carolina Hicks, Chiffon Thomas, Josh Cloud, Kayla Ephros, Lyric Shen, Venus Wikifur, Ellie Gordon, Forever Soo Hoo, Jonathan Chacon, Sebastian Loo, Clue Quilala, Kate Mosher Hall, and Aimee Goguen.

Wednesday, March 13th 6pm: Opening reception

Performance at 7pm1. Pamper routine (guided stretching warm up ) with harpist Leng Bian2. Procession ⁠commencement speech (Jonathan Chacon)3. Kayla Ephros Acapella3. Ducky banquet by Jade Sky4. ⁠Aasir Cherot (shimmy spectacle)5. ⁠A Thousand Bows Ensemble ( Forever Soo Hoo, Aasir Cherot, Walter Vargas and Cancion Paz) musicalized by Tigress of the Lilypad (Amia Yokoyama, Keane Nwede, Leti Soriano, and Mito del Desierto)Followed by closign reception with DJ Alitlebug and DJ Negashi Armada, 10pm to midnight

Friday, March 15th 6pm: Stretching warm-up and double-feature1. Pamper routine (guided stretching warm up)2. Friendship Speech (Gloria Galvez)Two films directed by Shūji Terayama3. Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1980) 1h 44m4. Fruits of Passion (1981) 1h 23m

Kyiv to LA presents: Nikolay Karabinovych, Teta Tsybulnyk & Elias Parvulesco
2024-03-17 18:00 - 21:00 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
Something Happened This Spring, 2014, 9:20, Nikolay Karabinovych

Join us on Sunday March 17 for a dinner and screening with artists Nikolay Karabinovych, Teta Tsybulnyk, Elias Parvulesco and curator Asha Bukojemsky. This event marks the second iteration of Kyiv to LA, a cross-cultural initiative inviting Ukrainian artists working across film, video and interdisciplinary research to participate in a Los Angeles-based residency and public program. This event will feature 6 short films, followed by a conversation, and music set by Nikolay Karabinovych.

6:00-7:00pm Potluck Dinner 7:00-8:00pm Screening and conversation 8:30-9:00pm DJ set by Karabinovych

This event is free and open to all. We encourage guests to bring food and drinks to share in the spirit of communal gathering and solidarity. Homemade perogies will be served!

RSVP and arrive early to reserve seating. All donations go towards Razom.

Kyiv to LA is made possible by a generous grant from Nora McNeely Hurley and Manitou Fund.

Nikolay Karabinovych works across video installation, performance, sound, and sculpture. He explores the social histories of Eastern Europe, approaching collective and personal memory by means of analytical, conceptual or interventionist tactics. His work has been shown internationally including M UHKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp; HKW, Berlin, Belgium Jewish Museum, Bozar, Brussels; w139, Amsterdam; Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv; Kaunas Biennale (2023), the Kyiv Biennale (2023, 2021) and in parallel programs of the 59th Venice Biennale. He graduated from the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent in 2020, and worked as an assistant curator at the 5th Odesa Biennale. In 2022, 2020 and 2018, he was awarded the first PinchukArtCentre Prize.

https://karabinovych.com/

Teta Tsybulnyk is an artist and psychoanalyst based in Kyiv. With a background in sociology, social anthropology and clinical psychology, her research investigates the non-human gaze on nature and semiotics of the unconscious. Tsybulnyk is the co-founder of ruїns collective, an art and film union established with Elias Parvulsco and Oleg Isakov (2017-2021). ruїns collective has authored a number of video works including dendro dreams (2017), zong (2019), K-Object from LL-Group (2019), Salty Oscillations (2021) and Endless Sea of Sand (2023), which have been screened at international film festivals and art exhibitions worldwide.

https://www.ruins.today/teta-tsybulnyk

Elias Parvulesco is an artist, curator and film archivist based in Kyiv. He is a film history scholar and programmer at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre in Kyiv (2015 to present); and co-founder of the art and film union ruїns collective (2017–21). As a director Parvulesco has been represented at Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (2014, 2018); FIDMarseille, Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille (2022); The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2022); Glasgow Short Film Festival (2022); Molodist Kyiv International Film Festival (2018); Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (2020), amongst many other international screenings and exhibitions. In 2020, Parvulesco was nominated for the PinchukArtCentre Prize.

https://www.ruins.today/elias-parvulesco

Endless Sea of Sand, 2023, 05:25, Teta Tsybulnyk & Elias Parvulesco

Alan S. Tofighi: Legal Fictions & Critical Bands (1993-2024)
2024-03-19 00:00 - 2024-03-23 23:59
Alan S. Tofighi: Legal Fictions & Critical Bands (1993-2024) Traces trajectories from two ongoing work cycles; Critical Bands (2010-present) and Legal Fictions (2014-present). Respectively rooted in histories & counter histories in the performance of objects and the processes of aesthetic forms utilized to forge and manipulate social structures, retrocausal collaboration of these separate arcs interlock and collaborate in real time. Further linking these zones is the accumulation of art adjacent remnants, refuse, and research repositories from past and future works in a complication of separation. Infinite game where the viewer can mine and undermine dominant culture to navigate their own counter history.

Accompanying the event will be two evenings of performances culminating with a closing performance on March 23, as part of Tofighi’s ongoing work of collecting acoustic and architectural samples where collaborators will acoustically shift the resonant frequencies and architectural basis of the site.

Alan S. Tofighi (they/them) is an Interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Southern California. Utilizing a background in research, performance, sound, consumer products, and video, their work deals with analyses of the dispersion, obfuscation, and formation of information/history to renegotiate narratives of history & power in the present. Tofighi utilizes the infiltration of legal parameters, social structures, myth, (dis)information, folk ontologies and extensive research of these cells as they shift from fringe culture to central in their infiltration/engineering of dominant culture.

Tofighi has shown work and/or performed at REDCAT, Blum & Poe, The Box, LACE, The Roxy, The Horse Dublin, The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, the wulf., Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, The Troubadour, MOTOR, The Hotel Congress, and many other sites/spaces throughout the world and internet.

There in Green California / هناك في كاليفورنيا الخضراء
2024-03-29 00:00 - 2024-04-19 23:59 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
Opening reception: Saturday, March 30, 6 – 10pm

Ali Eyal, Andre Keichian, Ignacio Perez Meruane, Izdihar Afyouni, Golrokh Nafisi, Hande Sever, Susu Attar

Gallery hours: Wednesday through Sunday, by appointment. Contact info@humanresourcesla.com to make a reservation.

Izdihar Afyouni, 2024 (detail), oil on canvas, 2024

It is difficult, even righteously offensive, to make art in the face of so much destruction and death which need little interpretation. The work of art (making), exhibition (making) and writing are never separate from their makers. And what of our “marginalized” identities if we can’t transform our lived experiences into ways of seeing and being in the world? Like grains of sand melted into a solid and fragile piece of glass, the alchemy allows for light to be filtered through so we can be guided by it. It is through this lens that we can see life and write about living in a carceral world invested in our slow and sudden death.

The artists in this exhibition address cycles of violence and loss. From the most abstract to the figurative, the material or psychological, they provide embodied perspectives across experiments with material and form. A violent memory of disappearance, dispossession and displacement etched onto a surface, rebuilt through layers of paint; An image that self-effaces as soon as it emerges. What is the role of memory in the age of total destruction?

There in Green California brings together works by artists who have been making work with the bombs already dropping; already on the run from the kidnappers and their haunting memories; already violated and already under siege; generations displaced and memories already relived through so many stories there is no separating them from fiction. And there is no dreaming without the nightmares.

The artists remind us of how the perceived peacefulness of our homes here is not in contrast to, but at the price of war at home over there. Here in our (not for much longer) green California, at the rate with which weapons are being made, we have been living in war for as far back as we can remember. Here in green California it is our struggles against indigenous dispossession and land theft, and our fights against the police and military industrial complex that connect us to the homes we have been uprooted from.

As I write this text the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza is continuing in the hands of the necrophiliac Israeli government and with the direct support of the so-called United States and its allies. Here in the West where rhetoric is constantly utilized to distract us from the material reality of genocide and ethnic cleansing, I am more wary of the art jargon. Moving away from rhetoric, it is the material that confronts me: the layers of paint on canvas forming the guts of an animal; the paper rolling down onto the floor to keep the image of a body afloat; the pristine yet dismembered body parts replicated from the monument of a colonizer; the black and white gradients of mundane photographs as testaments to systemic removal; wet clay that fire has fixed into the shape of bullets preserved from memory; lines that connect one arm to another extended across separate sheets of paper; and glass that, by letting light through, makes but the process of seeing visible.

There in Green California borrows its title from Ghassan Kanafani’s 1956 Letter from Gaza. In the fictional letter, Palestinian author and novelist addresses his comrade, Mustafa:

I won’t follow you to “the land where there is greenery, water and lovely faces” as you wrote. No, I’ll stay here, and I won’t ever leave. The choice to leave, the choice to stay or live one’s life as defined by crossing a border and living on both its sides, is not a question of privilege. Exile comes in its different shades and colors.

–Gelare Khoshgozaran

Human Resources Los Angeles commits to the Palestinian international call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS). The commitment to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel is twofold. It is a refusal to participate in the normalization of occupation and apartheid by Israel and a commitment to instead bring awareness to the material realities of these structures in Palestine. We stand with our colleagues who have already joined this movement, and who are putting their name on solidarity statements. We urge all arts organizations, writers, cultural workers, and artists to take action now. This boycott is a principled refusal to participate in artwashing. Learn more: https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi.

Gaza Community Aid Fundraiser & Art Raffle
2024-04-14 16:00 - 21:00
We are raising funds to help multiple families evacuate Gaza. Your raffle ticket costs will be entirely redirected to individuals working on the ground helping evacuate and resettle families.

Join us Sunday, April 14, 4-9PM at Human Resources Los Angeles:

♦ Listening sessions by DJs Discostan, Princess Dimebag & Friends♦ Mezze by Levant Bistro & Brothers Products♦ Homemade warm & cold beverages

Raffle Prizes:⬦ Astrology readings & natal chart reports by Alice Sparkly Kat⬦ Qi Gong sessions by bones tan jones⬦ Artworks by Ali Eyal, Saj Issa, Candice Lin, Stanya Kahn, Izdihar Afyouni, Bailey Hikawa & more!

You can enter the raffle remotely by purchasing tickets online.One raffle ticket gives you entry to the event. There is no limit to the number of raffle tickets you can buy.

If you prefer to make a direct donation, you can do so through the following link. Please put a “thank you” note only in the memo/comment section: https://linktr.ee/gazafam

WRITING ON RAVING: LOS ANGELES
2024-04-19 20:00 - 21:30
Writing on Raving is a reading and performance series curated by Zoë Beery, Geoffrey Mak and McKenzie Wark. The series opens a space for critical thinking, creative language, and verbal performance that celebrates, critiques, contextualizes, and vibe-checks the rave, the club, the dance floor, and techno from diverse and unheard perspectives. Featuring readings and performances by Zoë Beery, Sebastian Hernandez, Haley Hopkins, Michelle Lhooq, Geoffrey Mak, Natalie Robehmed and weepingwillowtree.

Zoë Beery is a journalist and harm reduction worker in Brooklyn. She has co-organized safer spaces programs for Nowadays, Sustain-Release, Horst Arts & Music, and Return to the Source. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Resident Advisor, and many other publications. Sebastian Hernandez is a multi-disciplinary artist and DJ, who received a B.A. in both Art Practice and Dance and Performance Studies from the University of California Berkeley. Sebastian explores making art with mediums like movement, sculpture, performance, photography, creative writing and DJing. Hernandez works with and through feminist, queer, indigenous and gender theoretical frameworks as well as notions of collectivity to generate works that complicate Mexican and Chicano narratives in the contemporaneous social imagination. Their art making is embedded in personal narrative, their indigenous Mexica (Aztec) ancestry, queer club culture and the history of the brown body in relation to the U.S.-Mexico borderland. Sebastian’s movement based practice is informed by their long standing practice of danza Mexica (Azteca), Vogue and a wide range of modern dance techniques like GAGA, Flying Low, Laban and Afro Modern. Expanding and growing from solo works to more collaborative art works and performances, Sebastian has worked with a variety of visual, sound, dance and fashion designers specific to their hometown of Los Angeles. These collaborative works have become a channel for new creative challenges that push to question and speak to the complexities of queer kinship and traditional art and dance today. Hernandez has presented work at REDCAT, Human Resources, LACE, Commonwealth& Council, MOCA Geffen Contemporary, ICA LA, MUSTACHE Mondays, Club Scum, NAVEL LA, ONE ARCHIVES, 4th street Bridge, Santee Alley, BOFFO, Performance Space New York, Palm Spring Art Museum, Jessica Silverman Gallery and more. In 2020, Sebastian was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award.

haley hopkins is a longtime dancer and friend to the rave scene. They have a background in performance art, critical theory and herbalism. In the daytime world they work with native plants, art handle and write. They’re concerned with exploring/exploding power dynamics and playing language games, they feel devotion to class analysis and dirt.

Michelle Lhooq is a writer who, by some combination of tenacity and youthful stupidity, decided to make a career out of being really, really good at partying. She was born in Singapore, an anti-hedonic country that William Gibson famously called “Disneyland with the death penalty,” and growing up under its extreme restrictions on assorted freedoms made her obsessed with drugs and nightlife like a bad kink. Lhooq’s work, mainly published in her newsletter Rave New World, is currently centered on the shifting paradigms of counterculture, underground raves, and psychedelics. She is the author of WEED: Everything You Want to Know But Are Always Too Stoned to Ask (Penguin Random House), and her writing can also be found in The Guardian, GQ, The Los Angeles Times, and Bloomberg. Once in a blue moon, she throws psychedelic parties in Los Angeles, where she is based.

Geoffrey Mak is the author of Mean Boys: A Personal History. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Artforum, The Guardian, Spike, and other publications. He has staged “performative readings” at Swiss Institute, CTM Festival, Kaje, and The Lab. He lives in Brooklyn.

Natalie Robehmed (aka Ghorba) is a Lebanese-British writer, musician and DJ. She has performed alongside artists including Rrose, Mama Snake and Light Asylum across the U.S. and Europe. She co-created the Feminist Synth Lab, a workshop series and synthesizer lending library for marginalized genders in Los Angeles. Her writing has appeared in Forbes and CNN as well as on several hit podcasts. Brought up in the U.A.E, they are now based in Los Angeles.

cleo (weepingwillowtree) is a DJ and digital media artist from Palmdale. The majority of her work explores themes of horror, self discovery and acceptance, and her roots as a black trans woman.

Admission to this event is free. HR’s entrance is accessible via ramp, and an ADA-compliant restroom is located on our ground floor. Indoor mask use is recommended.

Dorian Wood: This is not goodbye, it's just I won't ever see you again (a final purge)
2024-04-21 14:00 - 20:00
Dorian Wood bids farewell to Los Angeles, her birthplace and also her home for over 40 years. To mark her transition to the East Coast, Human Resources will host an event that features over 1,000 of Dorian’s original art works, t-shirts, prints, records and zines, all on display and available for purchase. Attendees will also get to experience an ongoing sound installation comprised of audio recordings from all of Dorian’s past performances at Human Resources. The event will culminate with one final performance by Dorian. All proceeds from the art sale will go to the artist–to help with her moving costs – and to Human Resources.

Art sale and installation from 2pm to 6:30pmPerformance from 7pm to 8pmAdmission is free

VENUS 2.0
2024-04-26 00:00 - 2024-04-28 23:59
Friday and Saturday performances begin at 8pm; Sunday performance begins at 6pm. Click here to purchase tickets.

VENUS 2.0 is a large-scale multi-media music performance by Tyler Matthew Oyer.

Set within a fantastic and dystopian dream-like sculptural and light installation, Oyer creates a full-length performance concert that combines their history with and research into the nightclub, esoteric rituals, experimental/queer theatre, and altered states of reflection, ecstasy, and togetherness. The movement of two performers mimics the celestial orbit of Earth and Venus as they orbit the sun – a metaphorical exploration of queer relationality beyond this planet and its oppressive forces.

In this gestamkunstwerk, the connective tissue is Oyer’s original music album BERLIN ALIEN.

VENUS 2.0 is a conjuring. It is a fantasy. It is a temporary release from the here and now.

Co-performer and choreographer: Kevin Zambrano (Dorian Electra, Post Malone, The Weeknd, Solange, Charli XCX, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker, Gerard & Kelly, Andy Blankenbuehler, West Side Story Broadway debut)

Lighting design: Veslemøy Rustad Holseter (lighting design at Berghain Ostgut, Trauma Bar und Kino; performs as Grinderteeth)

Stage design: Luc Sequeira

Location: Human Resources Los Angeles (Chinatown)

This performance is funded in part by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NY.

HRLA Studies: Alan Poma "Art, Time And Rebellion In Ancient Americas"
2024-04-29 00:00 - 2024-05-13 23:59
Art, Time, and Rebellion in Ancient Americas is the second installment of HRLA Studies, a series of free study sessions intended for skill sharing, thought provocation, collective learning and expansion of the commons. Two sessions are being offered this Spring. The sessions are free and open to everyone. No RSVP necessary. They take place in parallel to other HRLA programs at HRLA and around the area.HRLA Studies is a proposition instigated by clara lópez menéndez. Because the most memorable things we learn for free, like stolen fruit taste better.

Art, Time, and Rebellion in Ancient AmericasHosted by Alan PomaApril 29, May 6, and May 136:30 – 9pm

This seminar delves into the connections between pre-Columbian art and contemporary practices, offering a critical examination of ancestral traditions. Organized into three thematic sections—object and time, space and sound, celebration and rebellion—it enables participants to engage with diverse artistic forms and worldviews, highlighting how these expressions can also serve as a form of cultural resistance.

Reading for the first session: “‘Metaphysical Subtleties and Theological Niceties’: Incarnation, Incantations, Animism, and the Powers of Pre-Columbian Visual Imagery,” by Thomas B.F. Cummins.

Alan Poma is a Peruvian multidisciplinary artist who has developed the concept and practice of Andean Futurism. In his work, Poma investigates the characteristics of ancient American inhabitants, discovering resonances with the present. Alan’s work combines site-specific projects and various art forms, exploring connections between Avant Garde art traditions and Andean culture through collaboration with artists and scholars.

BAE BAE: SOUL RECOVERY
2024-05-07 19:30
BAE BAE (Kumi James) presents SOUL RECOVERY, a live electronic music and sound performance that investigates how sonic resonance helps to create and strengthen bonds between people and spaces, allowing us to regain access to our souls in a world that seeks to keep spiritual knowledge at bay.

The soundscape will be produced within the walls of Human Resources, and will function as a spiritual response to the materiality of the gallery space itself. The invitation to guests is to engage in a process of soul recovery through attunement to the sound generated in the space.

Tickets are $10 and available via Withfriends. No one turned away from lack of funds, but space is limited.

Special thanks to Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork for providing the sound system.

The Urgent Call of Palestine: a community fundraiser for Gaza
2024-05-11 19:00 - 22:00
In commemoration of Nakba Day, join us on Saturday, May 11th, at Human Resources LA or virtually, for The Urgent Call of Palestine—a community fundraiser for Gaza!

You can contribute to the fundraiser from anywhere in the world by buying a raffle ticket. 100% of the proceeds will be redirected to the Gaza Soup Kitchen to support their efforts in bringing food to the community! Together we are stronger and can make a bigger impact.

The fundraiser will be centered around:

Listening Session of The Urgent Call of Palestine by Zeinab Shaath (recently restored by Discostan and Majazz)

Film Screening of The Urgent Call of Palestine (5’ |1973) by Ismail Shammout.

Live Music and DJ sets by godchild, PAWS and Lionmilk.

The raffle will include artworks generously donated by the following artists from around the world — Ali Vanderkruyk, Atia Sen, Greg Jenkins, Jordan Wong, Josh Cloud, Karim Marold, Malavika Rao, Razan AlSarraf, Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar, Sohrab Hura, Ry Noor & Zoe J Moon.

Our in-person vendors include:

Tarot card readings and spellwork by Farah Abouzeid

Nail art by Fanfan Zhou

Flash Art Tattoos by Jessica Lee

Palestine Fabric Patches by Malavika Rao

Posters and Zines by Tomorrow Today

Homemade Food & Drinks

Virtual vendor:

Digital Portraits by Rhea Iyer

(Taking limited orders between May 11th-17th on a first come, first serve basis. Request your portraits here)

We are grateful for our artist vendors!

Ticket Price $15

This is an urgent call, buy as many raffle tickets as you can—the sky is the limit!(available on withfriends)

Co-hosted with Los Angeles FilmforumPoster Design by Rhea Iyer

Sculptors Painting
2024-05-17 00:00 - 2024-05-19 23:59
Organized by Cara Chan

Opening reception: Friday, May 17, 6 – 9pmGallery hours: Saturday, May 18 through Thursday, May 23, 12 – 6pmPainting event: Sunday, May 19, 2 – 5pm

We often think of art in categories: new media, performance, painting, sculpture. These can become limiting identities for artists, who must constantly challenge and renew their creativity. Sculptors Painting features 31 LA sculptors who were challenged to drop their Festools and take up the brush and palette. The artists were given complete freedom with one restriction: no 3D elements; ONLY oil or acrylic on canvas/linen/panel. The goal was to explore a foreign medium and inspire experimentation outside of the artists’ comfort zones. The works on view should therefore be read as paintings by artists accustomed to working in three dimensions. Different questions arise: How do ideas live in 2D versus 3D? How does embodied knowledge of mass and form translate onto canvas? Do style and identity transcend medium? Sculptors Painting is an exercise in play, breaking from the familiar and encouraging lightness.

Zoe Koke will be teaching a painting lesson on Sunday, May 19 from 2 – 5pm. Participants are asked to bring their choice surface: a primed canvas/panel/paper and paint: oil paint, acrylic paint, or watercolor. Limited canvas paper and materials will be available. The topic will be painting as a gesture to heal the body.

Participants:

Adrian mm AbelaBrenda BarriosDaniel Klass BeckwithCara ChanAllen Hung-Lun ChenMax ClearyGabriel CohenIvana Dama Ryan FloresLili Abdel-GhanyJulia GarderSylvia HardyNevada HardmanLouis HeilbronnMerideth HillbrandShana HoehnAlex KerrJordan Kolesnik ZZ KrebsAaron MeyersHallie McNeillGozie OjiniAryana PolatCarlos Vela-Prado Jackie RinesHope StutzmanKaren TepazDaniel Alejandro TrejoValeria Tizol Vivas Chris WarrChristopher Wawrinofsky Amia Yokoyama

labor & collective action as resistance
2024-05-25 11:00 - 15:00
Join us for a teach-in on May 25th hosted at Human Resources!

labor & collective action as resistance will explore how collective action can be applied to the spaces we inhabit. In awe of hundreds of organizing students and faculty across the US and beyond, we come together to share cooperative strategies as both lineage and fuel to the momentum of mass mobilizing. A series of invited speakers will discuss their work and experiences as organizers and union workers from the tech industry to the university to the museum. They will share ways to activate our work for a liberated Palestine and continue to build our toolkit for ongoing resistance in our every day. How does this tradition of people organizing show us ways we can pose an existential threat to American empire and what new modes are being born? When tactics can be shared, practiced, and mobilized together – the people have power. RSVP here!

SpeakersJackie Johnson is finishing her PhD in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies at USC. Over the past year and a half, she has helped organize Graduate Student Workers including serving on the bargaining team for the union’s first contract.

Meryem Kamil is an assistant professor of Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine. Her research is on Palestinian uses of technology. She has been a Palestine organizer since 2009, working on divestment campaigns at UC San Diego, University of Michigan, and through the UC-wide coalition of Faculty for Justice in Palestine.

Gabi Schubiner is a founding worker-organizer with No Tech for Apartheid. They reside in Brooklyn and imagine a world where the conditions of Tech labor support global liberation.

Dana Kopel is a writer, editor, and union organizer currently pursuing a PhD in US history at UCLA, where her research focuses on labor and leftist organizing during the later twentieth century.

Amara Higuera is an artist and educator who began her teaching journey in the 74% Latinx LAUSD school district where 59% of students qualify for free/reduced lunch. She began developing an anti-oppressive pedagogy while there. She was recently published in the anthology Cultivating Critical Conversations in Art Education, co-published with fellow educators who she started her organizing journey with.

Co-organizers

Amara Higuera & Anna Cho-Son is an artist and writer and currently works as a community programs manager at a food hub located in South Central LA. She was previously the curator and editor at Active Cultures. She studied Fine Arts and Food Studies.

Presented by

untune is an organism reliant on the contribution of interchanging parts —a social experiment in building support and natural resources with parameters continually reset to remain grounded in current issues relating to the correlation between culture, ecology, and food sovereignty—a creative entity for learning and supporting the teachings of Indigenous wisdom and ecological knowledge—within and outside a curatorial fieldwork.Additional Notes We encourage participants to arrive at 11am for tea & coffee* and stay throughout the day. The program of speakers will be from 11:20am-2:15pm (15 minute midpoint break included). Speakers will gather at the end of individual presentations for a Q&A panel and discussion.

Masks are required for this event and free masks will be available at the door. Testing encouraged! HR is physically accessible with a small ramped entrance and ADA-compliant bathroom. Event will be held in English.*Bring your own mugs or tumblers if you can Please remember to RSVP

David Bad: all in, win or lose
2024-05-29 00:00 - 2024-06-03 23:59
Opening reception: Wednesday, May 29th 6 – 9pm Gallery hours: Thursday, May 30th through Monday, June 3rd, 12 – 6pm

Ever since I can remember I’ve been painting, drawing, sketching, or coloring something. Being introduced to art at a very young age and having family members encouraging it, is why I paint for more hours than I sleep. With art i feel as if i always need to have a sketch book around, or pen and a napkin as I wait for the waiter to bring my food. A sort of Freedom of doing without thinking, freedom from thinking; sort of.

I do give all the credit to my mother and siblings for pushing me towards art or any creative outlet. My mother was a teacher’s assistant and would come home with fresh crayons and new books for me to draw in. We used to go to record stores and pick out CDs, my mother was a classic rock and oldies lover. My older brother, who was a graff writer, had these books with amazing word style art pieces with characters in them. Some pages just scribble, some very detailed similar graffiti pieces to the ones I’d see out on the streets. Thinking what great lengths and fun adventures these graffiti artists would go on to put up a “NAME”, on a billboard or on risking it on some train tracks. My oldest sister use to sew her own clothes and Halloween costumes. She was also the best illustrator of all of us and taught me a lot about drawing. My sister Justine was heavy into music, she was the one who got us to go out and buy CDs. She would collect her music off the radio by recording them on cassette tapes, I actually got my taste in music from her.

My name is David Bad, born and raised in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, California 90031, five minutes from Chinatown. I’m a painter but have other various skills as well as photography, sculpting, and music production, and more creative outlets i come across worth learning. This art show, however, is a painted series; it being my first show ever I’d like to show you my favorite thing in the whole world to do. This show is called “All In, Win or Lose,” which consist of 52 hand painted playing cards. The images painted represent Chicano culture, Lucha Libre matches, pin striped low riders, Aztec ceremonies, gold hoop earing with thin eyebrows, elotes, tamales, tacos with tapatio, the Zoot Zuiters, white blank tee with greased up over sized 501s while sporting Corteze. The lifestyle I was raised in.

– David Bad

Two Tongues, Multiple Mothers
2024-06-07 18:30 - 21:00
Poster design: Woohee Cho

Two Tongues, Multiple Mothers is a one night event consisting of screenings, performances, and objects that explore the space between languages as liminal bodies. The process of translation and interpretation is not widely known, and the delicate existence of these bodies is rather mysterious and misunderstood. Through personal, historical, and fictional narratives, Jisoo Chung, Dajin Yoon, Ruoyi Shi, and Woohee Cho investigate multiplicity in this transitional space.

*

Jisoo Chung’s Miss Kim Lilac is a story about a lilac tree called ‘Miss Kim’ that was brought to America from its native Korea and named by an American botanist. The tree’s name, which has changed over time as it moved across countries, is an imprint of colonial history, capitalization of nature, and the migration of Korean women. In the twenty-minute experimental documentary film, Miss Kim Lilac(2023), Chung’s journey to New Hampshire where she finds the early Miss Kim lilac specimens intersects with the narrative of its history that unfolds through the lilac’s perspective. If the name is the most fundamental linguistic framework to recognize oneself, will Miss Kim be able to find herself lost inside her multiple names?

Dajin Yoon’s First Person Perspective is a text-based performance that starts with the character called One who wakes up to find out that the world it lives in has changed significantly. The reactions from peers confuses One. Amongst the discrepancies in opinions, the familiarity of the shared language defamiliarizes, impairing One’s understanding of the worldly order. Then emerges the tenuous nature of perceptions where the individuals rely on their intuition for translation, filling in the gaps of the context and new meaning.

Ruoyi Shi’s (un)readable? (um)readable playfully blurs between readable and unreadable, speakable and unspeakable through drawings and sculptural objects. When a computer program cannot recognize foreign characters, it often uses hollow square shapes as the placeholder. These squares, sharing the same shape as the Chinese word (Kou),” meaning “mouth” in English, serve as a visual representation. However, devoid of meaning and sound, they remain silent, unable to convey any message. Originating from Pictograms, Chinese characters are simplified depictions of tangible objects. They evolved from literal representations to encompass symbolic and metaphoric meanings. The character “Kou” not only signifies actions involving the mouth but also serves as a fundamental element in the structure of other characters. I modified the text from the chosen paragraph, keeping only the square shapes. These squares will be used to form content that is both readable and unreadable, speakable and unspeakable to all of us.Woohee Cho’s Letters Ladders is a performance, where he climbs up and down between two ladders while writing fragments of his journal regarding his recent loss on the wall. It deals with questions about queer diaries, family trauma, diaspora, and (mis)translation. When you lose words to describe your emotions, which languages are you drawn to grapple with? When language slips through the net, can we still exchange something through art?

*

Jisoo Chung is an interdisciplinary artist who works between Los Angeles and Seoul. Primarily through video and installation, she focuses on sociocultural constructs within quotidian objects and technology to explore language and the loss of one’s agency. Nonsense, mistranslations, personifying objects, and non-human perspectives are used in her works to re-navigate the idea of the self.

Dajin Yoon is an artist based in Los Angeles working in performance, drawing, and installation. Her practice examines the limits of language and its ability to shape, activate, and obfuscate beliefs and perceptions within shared experiences and anecdotal narratives.

Ruoyi Shi is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Inspired by ancient tales and rituals intertwined with language, habits, and societal norms, she combines humor and fiction to construct her poetic narratives. Her work explores the interface between nature and artificial existences, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication. Woohee Cho is a visual artist based in Los Angeles and Seoul. He received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (2020) and a BFA from Seoul National University (2014). His works focus on moments in everyday life where individual identity collides with or is subsumed by society. These are transformed into installations, videos, and performances as a means of queering the normativity of society. Gathering, personalizing, and laughing are the primary methodologies of his practice. His work has been shown at Post Territory Ujeongguk, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Roy Edna Disney CalArts Theater, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Cork International Film Festival, among others.

WET NIGHTMARES: transvestiary of horrors
2024-06-09 19:30 - 21:00
Spiritual sessions with popper-induced trances, lycanthropic nahual strippers, anal vampiresses. Binding spells sealed with a rain of blood, satanic dances. Sexual pacts with demonic entities and orgies with transsexual “tlahuelpuchis” that produce wet nightmares. These are some of the acts on offer in this Los Angeles debut by Lechedevirgen. Lechedevirgen crosses sexual dissidence and performance art with horror and mesoamerican mysticism. The monstrosity of non-binary trans BIPOC identities are deployed as figures of political transformation, staging decolonizing raids against white supremacist, transphobic, heteropatriarchal mechanisms of stigmatization, pathologization and criminalization.

“En mi tierra no somos queer, somos jotxs. En mi tierra no somos drag queens, somos travestis. En mi tierra no hacemos performance art, hacemos brujería.”

Tickets ($15) available via WithFriends.

First Draft
2024-06-10 20:00 - 22:00
Tickets are $5 – 20, sliding scale; click here to purchase.

First Draft is an evening of Experimental Works-in-Process for Los Angeles based dance and performance artists. The evening serves as a creative laboratory for wide-ranging artistic investigations in movement-based mediums for artists at all stages of their creative development. This round’s artists include Will Rawls, Sophia Cleary, Jay Carlon, and Maya Gurantz.

First Draft was instigated and is curated and produced by Emily Barasch. Emily is honored to continue curating First Draft, she feels passionately about bringing local Los Angeles experimental performance artists together and creating more spaces for connection, experimentation, and exchange!

Rehearsals for A Color Play
2024-06-15 00:00 - 2024-06-23 23:59
Anna Betbeze and HR present: Rehearsals for A Color Play

Gallery Hours: Thursday-Sunday, 12 – 6pmOpening: Saturday, June 15, 4 – 6pmOpen rehearsals: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, June 21 – 23, 4 – 6pmClosing Reception: Sunday, June 23, 6 – 8pm

Rehearsals for A Color Play is an experiment, an invitation, a painting, a stage, and a score. A space to consider that color is a live material, extra-visual, beyond optical/retinal sensation. Using dyed fabrics as its central material, curtains, shrouds, veils, clothing, and flags become sites for color language, expressivity, kinetic form, and social and political organization.

Rehearsals will be the first phase in an ongoing project, A Color Play, that interrogates the expressive aspects of color. Color here is not theoretical, it is tethered to experience and cannot be unbound or contained, it bounces; reflects, seeps, touches, an active catalyst for all kinds of change.

Each day will perform a chapter, each chapter an inquiry into hidden aspects of color. The first chapter, The Swamp, will play with color’s ruinous, entropic, and muddy aspects; the potential for synaesthetic landscape, fusing ends with beginnings. Each chapter will follow the last, improvisationally, an open ended project designed to change course.

Betbeze invites participants and showgoers to play and intervene in the set, and/or to sit, lounge, contemplate, listen. Rehearsals will be held 4 – 6 pm Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The stage set will be on display for viewing during gallery hours, 12 – 6 pm.

Rehearsals for a Color Play extends and bridges Anna Betbeze’s experiments with touch and the tactile sense. This project marks the beginning of experiments into the psychological, social, and affective registers of color, through returning color to the tactile, material world.

The immediacy and honesty of sensation reveal complexities in human experience that can critique, destabilize, and de-center the dominance of visual perception in contemporary culture.We exist within a world that is increasingly circumscribed by the optics of digital technology, and its concomitant limitations and expansions of the perceivable world. Centering sensation allows me to consider the fullness and ephemerality of lived experience and the true urgencies of this moment alongside the supposed deathlessness of artistic creation.

Special thanks to: HR, Aimee Goeblins Gougen, John Buttdial, Jennifer Doyle, Andre Keichian, Corazón Del Sol, Jason Gowans, The Guggenheim Foundation, BAU Institute, Camargo Foundation and University of California-Riverside.

David Aguirre: Los días
2024-06-28 00:00 - 2024-06-30 23:59
Lunes, día de luna (2024), oil on canvas, 72″ x 84″

Opening reception: Friday, June 28, 6 – 9pmOpen hours: Saturday, June 29 and Sunday, June 30, 12 – 6pm

David Isaac Aguirre (b.1992, Fresno, CA) is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. David earned a bachelor of arts degree from California State University, Fresno in 2014 and a master of fine arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts in 2016. Their work has been shown in Los Angeles at the Ace Hotel, Panel, Human Resources, and at CalArts.

This exhibition comprises seven paintings commemorating the days of the week.

Los días began many years ago, on a walk of unknown duration, aim, or physical destination. David Aguirre was cultivating a different kind of practice then, one that revolved around wandering: he would tread aimlessly between unmarked points, get lost on purpose, scatterplot his way back home. Often, like the wandering poets and philosophers-on-foot that came before, these walks were a pretext for exhaustive studies or more rigorous exercises in perception: the artist would embed himself among the warm brown crags and wild sages of the California coast simply to observe interchanges of light, from dawn until dusk. Consciously, graciously, he did what monks do — mastering the meditations of holding and letting go. David met and released many tentative mornings and stone-cut slants of noon. He basked in golden hours and passed through lonelier thresholds into the gloaming. Even after nightfall, David remained to do more granular work, digging out only the quietest and most refined notes of black and blue.The works owe their sophistication to the twin engines of David’s practice: short term maximalist additive processes and protracted editorial reductions. He indulges compositional overgrowths in anticipation of the eventual slash and burn, eager, later, to recover connections between dozens of subterranean paintings. David dredges up marks that are in some breaths delicate metallurgical chain links, in others blood cells freighted with oxygen, or a weeping coagulation of platelets. A cluster of lily pads and jellyfish might emerge from the bottom of an expanse of water. In one particularly wine-dark composition, David’s familiar hashed ovals reposition themselves as muddy stars or a crowd of moons, suspended in a fused sky-sea.

There is a mysterious presence to these years-long paintings about days, as if something ancient lives between the compressions of time and space. While he revels in the energetic vectors and unexpected synchronicities of his underpaintings, David manages to move within the frame in the absence of a dominant underpinning. An expert in deferral, he constantly wavers between firm establishments of ground. Viewing begins to feel like floating, and in the course of following each construction of light, the eye is coaxed into weightlessness. Colors become moody in real-time, proponents of a changing condition rather than a static terrain. The painting grows nostalgic remembering itself: every gesture is diaristic, resting on its former lives and contexts. It’s difficult not to be swayed by their collective psychology.

As a markmaker, David is patient, tolerant, generous. To be in the company of his paintings is to travel somewhere that couldn’t possibly exist, but you can stay there as long as you’d like. Each heavily reworked surface is an intimate excavation site—a crystallized formation of many-places, many-times, many-feelings. In the end, David clings to the continuum, the slipstream, the eddy and the whirl. He doesn’t often know how a painting will end, but he always catches the precise moment it is finished speaking: sometimes mid-sentence, or caught whispering in a close corridor, the painting suddenly unburdens its heart.

– Martina Onyemaechi

Transfiguration International Film Festival
2024-07-05 18:30 - 23:00
Doors at 6:30pm Screenings at 7pm

THE TRANSFIGURATION INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL is a traveling film festival showcasing an eclectic variety of experimental short films. Curated by Jonni Peppers (award-winning animator / filmmaker, lead programmer for animation shorts at Slamdance Film Festival, jury member at Ottawa International Animation Festival, etc.), Transfiguration 2024 features work by a diverse selection of experimental independent + student filmmakers, new and old, sweet and mean, silly and serious, animation and live action.

I started with a long shortlist of around 250 films that were hand picked based on my taste and narrowed it down to 35 stellar shorts that will blow your mind. The goal was to put together a satisfying block that covers a wide array of topics and styles while also feeling like a cohesive experience. The work featured is kinetic, raw, interesting, human, passionate, and all made by individuals or very small teams. At Transfiguration International Film Festival, we implore you to think worldwide, start giving a shit, and wake up from the bad dream. See you there…

Page Person: GREEN SCREEN VOCAL SAC
2024-07-07 19:00 - 20:30
A meditation on our relationships with nature and technology, GREEN SCREEN VOCAL SAC invites attendees to use their phone/device to playback a video (accessible via QR code) to create an environment in which the artist will tell a story from a recent experience with a population of California tree frogs in the San Gabriel mountains. Audience participation is intended to foster community thinking; not only between us as individuals but also with the various other life forms whose needs intersect with ours. How can we imagine new ways of thinking about our environment while acknowledging our complicity in its destruction? What does interspecies learning look like? What is love and how can we sustain it? Does evolution favor competition or interdependence? What is in the water and is it making the frogs gay?Page Person (M. Page Greene; 1972, Atlanta) is a visual and performing artist based in Los Angeles. Their work has been exhibited in galleries including Peres Projects, Stuart Shave/Modern Art and Deitch Projects; museums such as the Hammer Museum, The New Museum, DESTE Foundation, Kunsthalle Schirn, and Kunsthalle Vien. Person’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Frieze, The New York Times, The Believer, Artillery, Flash Art, The Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Frank Cohen Collection, DESTE Foundation and the Luckman Gallery of Los Angeles City College. Person has performed at the Hammer Museum, the Broad Museum, LAXART, Glasslands, Los Angeles LGBT Center, Human Resources, Los Angeles Nomadic Division, and in queer nightlife spaces throughout Los Angeles.

Audrey Leshay: The Science of Last Things
2024-07-12 00:00 - 2024-07-14 23:59
Opening reception: Friday, July 12, 6 – 9pmGallery hours: Saturday, July 13 and Sunday, July 14, 12 – 6pm

Audrey Leshay (b. 1997) is a painter from and based in Los Angeles. She graduated from UCLA in 2019 with a BA in Fine Art, and has exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Punto Lairs (LA), Piazza Palazzo (LA), Noon Projects, Import/Export (LA), Heaven Gallery (CHI), and Human Resources.

Ashira Darwish | a Sufi prayer for Gaza
2024-07-13 18:30 - 20:30
Join us for a Sufi prayer and sacred dance of power for Gaza. Ashira Darwish will lead an active Sufi meditation to release stress, grief and anger. We will then join together in chanting and Sufi whirling to build resilience in our hearts and bodies. Register here!

We ask that attendees make contributions to Catharsis holistic healing, a trauma therapy project in Palestine. Please bring proof of donation; we will also accept contributions at the door.

Ashira Darwish is the founder of Catharsis holistic healing. She is known for pioneering Sufi active meditation to help people suffering from continuous trauma. This type of active meditation draws its roots from ancestral and Indigenous knowledge. Her personal journey of healing from full body paralysis with a severed spinal cord in 2012 has given her a deep insight into the process of recovery and healing. This unique perspective allows her to offer a highly specialized and culturally sensitive approach to trauma healing. In 2021, she received the ISABS Honors from the Indian Society for Applied Behavioral Science for her contribution to positive societal transformation through the application of behavioral science principles and practices. Ashira started her career in Palestine as a journalist; she worked for 15 years as TV & Radio journalist and researcher for the BBC, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Ben Bennett | Jeonghyeon Joo | Stephanie Cheng Smith | Michael Bailey
2024-07-21 19:00 - 23:00 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
Ben Bennett is a Philadelphia-based improvising percussionist and artist who plays a compact pile of self-made drums, stretched membranes, and other objects which are continually rearranged in the course of playing, and sounded with techniques of the hit, rub, and blow varieties.

Stephanie Cheng Smith is a composer, performer and programmer who creates interactive pieces, installations, improvisations and through-composed works.

Jeonghyeon Joo is a haegeum performer/composer based in Los Angeles and Seoul. Her practice includes performance, composition, improvisation, artistic research, collaboration, writing, and teaching.

michael bailey is a self-taught musician and multimedia artist with a deep interest in the relationship between sound and time through interdisciplinary research spanning music technology, psychoacoustics, and environmental studies.

Doors at 7pm / Music at 8pm

$5 Donation / NOTAFLOF (click here to purchase)

Ringdown
2024-07-23 20:00 - 23:00
Left: Mattie Barbier. Center: Alex Hawthorn. Right: Stephanie Cheng Smith, photo by Lena Pozdnyakova.

Tickets are $10; click here to purchase.

On July 23rd, 2024 at Human Resources Los Angeles, Alex Hawthorn will present an evening of experimental electronic music performances by renowned artists, culminating in the world premiere of their new work, “Ringdown”. The evening will feature opening solo sets by Stephanie Cheng Smith (electronics), Mattie Barbier (trombone), and Hawthorn (electronics).For their Human Resources debut, sound artist and composer Alex Hawthorn brings their singular blend of electronics, field recordings, and contact mics to build lush, dense ambient soundscapes, dilating time to explore the intricacies of small sounds.“Ringdown” draws inspiration from the phenomenon of the same name, first recorded in 2015, which describes the gravitational waves emitted during the final stage of a merger of two black holes, as they combine into a singular entity. Hawthorn was struck by the data, which showed these gravitational waves were oscillating in the range of human hearing. “Ringdown” builds on this data to imagine the sonic possibilities of such a merger.

The concert features design elements by Jane Hamor, Claire Chrzan, and Drew Sensue-Weinstein.

*Stephanie Cheng Smith is an L.A.-based composer, performer and programmer who creates interactive pieces, installations, improvisation, and through-composed works. Often using electronics, violin and light elements, Smith’s work stretches from ensemble performances and the realization of others’ scores to a solo practice that has included several projects that each utilize a novel technology-driven instrument of her own devise. Developing software and designing circuitry to control motorized elements, she has imagined a unique hybrid form where physical materials such jingle-bells, plastic cups, or pieces of paper can be deliberately – or aleatorically – controlled to “perform” expressive and organic sound events. A recent work, Life Cycles, uses such apparati to vibrate vellum, evoking the sound of cicadas. Smith’s 2021 album Forms was released on A Wave Press.

Mattie Barbier is an LA based musician and sonic researcher focused on experimental intonation, noise, and the physical processes of their instrument. Their playing has been described by the LA Times as being “of intense, brilliant, virtuosic growling that gave the striking impression that Barbier was dismantling the instrument while playing it,” by the Wire as “exploring the nooks of instrumental tone far beyond the reach of most mortals,” and by the New Yorker as being a “diabolically inventive trombonist-composer.”Mattie engages in collaborative relationships with a range of musicians including Weston Olencki, Ellen Arkbro, Clara Iannotta, Sarah Davachi, Michelle Lou, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Jacob Kirkegaard, and Katherine Young. As an interpreter they have given premieres by and collaborated with a broad spectrum of composers including George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Liza Lim, Lester St. Louis, Kevin Drumm, Kaori Suzuki, Raven Chacon, and Scott Walker. Mattie is a member of RAGE Thormbones, wildUp, echoi, wasteLAnd music, and is an active soloist and improviser on low brass instruments and bagpipes. Additionally they teach at CalArts.Mattie has presented and created work with and for the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Getty Villa, Monday Evening Concerts, San Francisco Exploratorium, Indexical, Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series, Roulette Intermedium, RedCat, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Ensemble Apparat, Factory Seconds Brass Trio, and Issue Project Room as well as in collaboration with holographer Tristan Duke. They have made a wide array festival appearances including: Borealis (NO), IMD Darmstadt (DE), Donaueschinger (DE), Maerzmusik (DE), Bludenz Tage zeitgemäßer (AT), Spor (DK), Chicago’s Frequency Festival, Dartington International Summer School (UK), Kalv Festival (SE), JAMA (SK), Minu (DK), the Ojai Music Festival, and Musica Nova Helsinki (FI) with the Helsinki Philharmonic, as well as at Donaueschinger with the SWR. Various recording projects have been released on Sofa Music, Dinzu Artifacts, Carrier, Tripticks, Populist, Mode, Hat Hut, Innova, Late Music, Faux Amis, New Focus, Domino, New Amsterdam, and Kairos Records.

Alex Hawthorn is an artist, composer, and technologist whose work flows between performance, installation, object-making, and sound-making. As a non-binary interdisciplinary artist, Hawthorn is most comfortable outside prescriptive boxes, allowing their research and intuition to shape the form and medium of their projects. They use their work as a lens through which to investigate the natural world, specifically focusing on time: how we experience it, how we have codified it, and how we exist within it. Hawthorn’s recent research has focused on extremely long timescales: from the geological to the galactic.

Hawthorn has performed at sound art festivals nationally and internationally, most recently as part of the opening of the Floating Transmissions festival in Hamburg, Germany. Hawthorn’s work in theatrical sound design has garnered them an Obie award, LA Ovation Awards, and has been heard across North and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East. www.AlexHawthorn.com / @afhawthorn

Secret Magic Show
2024-08-02 00:00 - 2024-08-04 23:59
Anna Hrund Másdóttir, Rollin Hunt, and Aimee Goguen

opening reception: Friday, August 2, 6 – 9pmopen hours: Saturday and Sunday, August 3 – 4, 12 – 6pm

There is almost not an interval
2024-08-17 00:00 - 2024-09-08 23:59
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha “Mouth to Mouth” (1975) black and white video, sound

Open hours 12-6pm Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays and by appointment all other times

Renee GladmanWill RawlsTheresa Hak Kyung ChaAllison ParrishJJJJJerome EllisSarah RaraLuke Fischbeck

“People will never believe you are ‘without events.’ And that is why decay is slow, and why it is not devastation.” (1)

Intervals are what a threshold makes, a here and there, (held) in suspension, a distinction (telling the difference), undifferentiated (holding difference), without separation, a crossing, where limits meet, anticipation (a margin to move in), body horror (I’m an alien), reperforming events, switching (logic), binary, alternating, lenticular, talking back, the transformation of silence into language and action, some temporalities (for sure), stop motion, flicker, duration, bracketing, the suspension of judgment, the withholding of assent, the preconditions, the prior logic, intersection, coincidence, suture, stitch, montage, cut, rupture, glitch, break, gap, clearing, hesitation, some kinds of waiting, losing control, building community, falling in love, between thought and speech, between speech and act, between action and listening, between memory and futurity, between what’s in my head and what’s in yours, side by side, boundary objects, parallel selves, the fantasy of continuity, a movement between the pieces, fragments of actual energy, time away, life, a long take, notes in a chord, frames in a film, unnatural bridges. “Allegory, here, is material,” Ian White wrote: “An interval, occupied.” (2)

“Intervals”, Trinh T. Minh-Ha observed, don’t “bring about any tremor like ‘passion,’ ‘death,’ or ‘love.’” It’s thanks to intervals, however, that “a direct relation is possible: a relation of infinity assumed in works that accept the risks of spacing and take in the field of free resonances—or, of indefinite substitutions within the closure of a finite work.” (3)

A barely-perceptible interval is space enough for holding movement between pieces that have been cut apart or never really touched, whose relation is latent or obscured. We will approach “intervals” as tainted binaries or boundaries: before and after, bodies and spaces, events and images, internal and external, spoken and thought, original and translation. Forms to explore include traveling in time, interpolating (imagined continuities), waiting (pausing, anticipating), transducing (moving across one medium into another), flickering, hovering over, pivoting on, or crossing of thresholds, pushing sequences out of order, ambivalence, and self-contradiction. Intervals show a special kind of coherence across duration, distance, or difference. Intervals are the mechanics of memory and representation, the choreographies of reconstruction, where fiction and testimony are glued together to assemble critical, speculative, fabulous histories.

Will Rawls “Sister Spell” (video still)

Will Rawls “Sister Spell” (video still)

Sarah Rara “Untitled (Door)” 2024 (video still)

Sarah Rara “Untitled (Door)” 2024 (video still)

“There is almost not an interval. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused […] the rapidity of the change is always startling.” (4)

The whiplash of recognition!

(1) Renee Gladman, The Ravickians(2) Ian White, “What is Material?”(3) Trinh T. Minh-Ha, “Beware of Wolf Intervals”(4) Gertrude Stein, “Composition as Explanation”

Holly Harrell: The argument at the family barbecue the day after the office St. Patrick’s Day party
2024-09-12 00:00 - 2024-09-13 23:59
Thursday, September 12 and Friday, September 13, 7pmA surgical exquisite corpse. An eternal reoccurrence. A replica made from memory with no skills to work with.A two day participatory performance. The first night we investigate the space, take it apart and then rebuild it from memory with no references. The second night we activate the space through improvised situations which force us to negotiate an unfamiliar circumstance.Through this activation we unmake what was made.

Holly Harrell subverts genres in an attempt to find what confronts us in reality and in between realities, bifurcating the varied experiences of the audience.
