Human Resources

Page Person - THE EAR* (*or how I became a person)
2023-03-19 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
THE EAR* (*or how I became a person) is a performance by interdisciplinary artist Page Person Sunday, March 19 at 5:00 pm. At a time when the very existence of trans people is under attack, the artist describes how claiming space for their own existence healed a lifetime of being the subject of discrimination, bullying and the treat of physical assault. Who owns the narrative of our lives? If a hurtful narrative is placed upon us, how can we assert ourselves and change that narrative? Person physically manifests as The Ear, an oversized organ for hearing, and invites the audience to hurl fragmented sounds and syllables of various homophobic and transphobic slurs; enacting the harm that it caused them as an individual to absorb these sounds. The Ear becomes twisted, bound and deformed from the abuses enacted upon it. Various ritualized re-enactments of performances from their early drag career then give voice and agency to the artist and incrementally heal The Ear; which by the end of the work is returned to a whole and complete state. Owning the narrative of their gender has been the single healthiest choice the artist has made in a career that spans three decades; here they speak directly about their experiences and ask who has the right to deny us the power of creating our own life stories to live as complete people.

Christine's 2022 Schedule C
2023-03-15 20:00
Christine’s 2022 Schedule C

Christine Tien Wang

Human Resources is ashamed to present a performative lecture by Christine Tien Wang. She will walk audiences through 12 years of filing taxes as a self-employed artist and reporting losses for many of those years. As a financial exhibitionist, Christine will also talk about her family’s financial history as it relates to her own artistic production. The lecture will close with Christine showing audiences her 2022 Schedule C. All of her artist expenses from last year will be revealed.

CROM: The Cocaine Wars 1974-1989
2023-03-04 19:30
In celebration of the LP/CD re-release of The Cocaine Wars 1974-1989 on To Live A Lie Records, CROM will be performing the album in its entirety at their first Sumerian Swap Meet. The event also includes performances by:

Phalanx

Civerous

Traümer

Red Rot

DNS

Organized with Snow Goat Productions and Church of the 8th Day.

Doors at 7:30pm

Exquisite Corps: a trio of solos
2023-03-01 19:00
Exquisite Corps: a trio of solos by

mia simonović / allie miks / diana relth

Human Resources Gallery

Wednesday, March 1st

Doors at 7pm

$10 suggested donation

masks are encouraged

“Exquisite Corps” is one night of 3 solo performances by 3 artists.

mia simonović (they/them/she/her) is a Balkan-American movement artist and teacher. mia’s choreography explores vessels such as the body and their abilities to share messages through movement, feedback, and sensation. Photo credit: Matt Jones

allie miks (she/her) is a performing artist, mover, and teacher from Los Angeles. She creates in a process-based method that focuses on collaboration with others involved. The piece allie will present is in collaboration with Designer Artist Kelsey Vidic. Photo credits: Matthew Genecov (flyer), Skye Schmidt (portrait)

Diana Relth (she/they) is an artist and performer navigating liminal spaces, and draws connections between seemingly disjointed places. Diana’s performance is in collaboration with Musician Garrett Scott Dowell. Photo credit: Madison Stonefield

Wayne Koestenbaum: Transitional Apparitions of the Gutter Empyrean
2023-02-26 19:00
Transitional Apparitions of the Gutter Empyreana screening of new and recent films by Wayne KoestenbaumSunday, February 26, 20237 p.m.

The screening will be followed by a conversation between Wayne Koestenbaum and the artistand filmmaker Pau S. Pescador, who curated the program.

Wayne Koestenbaum is a New York-based writer, artist, and performer. He has published 22books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, and Figure It Out. His first feature-lengthfilm, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (NYC) in December 2021.

Amy Chiao, Gregory Barnett, José Guadalupe Sánchez III, Zeina Baltagi
2023-02-21 20:00 - 22:00
New performances on a Tuesday night.

Amy Chiao

Chicken Bones for the Capital Soul® is an American self-help, consumer goods, and performance media group. Starting in Chiao’s kitchen during the 2020 lockdown, her bone cleaning turned accessories products began as a process art practice that ritualistically developed her spiritual entrepreneur alter ego, BBL, the Bone Business Lady. Inspired by maintenance art and craft therapy, BBL collaborates with Los Angeles based Certified Pro-Bone(r) Cleaners and Creatives to transcend their bodies with the bone material into evolutionary, manifestation machines producing a boundless supply of oral currency.

Gregory Barnett

Wandering Purgatory Dance – if you’re lost forever feats of endurance lose their merit, rogue Hummel figurine following a bird through the desert, a forgotten grandpa waltz, a farmer’s fable.

José Guadalupe Sánchez III

Many-way Conversations – This performance explores a nepantler@’s epistemology of self. That is, how a nepantler@ may come to know or not know. You know?

Zeina Baltagi

This body was never mine, presented by Zeina Baltagi

Intaglio etching on handmade paper made out of cotton U.S. military uniforms Chine-Collé ‘d on to handmade paper made out of pink and white medical paperwork, diary letters and colorful children’s yarn, with a boot print. Size: 15” x 22” Year: 2012 Image Courtesy of the artist.

Adrian Abela: Nebula and Gentes
2023-02-10 18:00
Nebula and Gentes were initially made for an extensive installation called CHARTI and exhibited in 2016. Nebula was also shown as part of the Malta Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017. The videos were recorded on Malta and Gozo over three summers starting in 2014. The work revolved around the rituals that the inhabitants of the islands would perform as part of catholic festivals that celebrate the saint of the town or village. Nebula is compromised of footage of fireworks which would normally indicate the initiation of the rituals and their closure. It was filmed with the intention of accessing an essence rather than an aesthetic of an identity. Gentes, on the other hand, records other aspects of these rituals and the people that perform them.

Miles Peyton: Obaa
2023-02-03 00:00 - 2023-02-05 23:59
Miles PeytonObaaHuman Resources, LA

February 3-5, 2023Opening Friday, February 3rd, 6-8pm

I move with a team of selvesI observe and learn from each oneSometimes we find something to eat and feel happyI often eat plastic beadsWhen we merge, our attention harmonizes into a sharp bright pointWe congeal into a centralized organizationIt feels good

Miles Peyton is an artist based in Los Angeles. He works with a variety of materials and systems to animate lifelike nonlife. He received an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in 2020.

Gemma Castro: Monuments
2023-01-21 19:00 - 2023-01-31 18:00
Opening Saturday, 21st 7-10pm

Exhibition is open Friday-Sunday, January 21-31st, 12-5pm

Closing Performance: Gemma Castro + Olivia HP: Sunday January 29, 6PM

Gemma Castro: Monuments

Monuments is a video installation exploring the process of rebuilding and restoration following heartbreak and loss. It reflects on how building physical and mental strength is a process of repetition with variation. A porous structure made from cinder blocks frames the video composed of everyday moments of work and rest. The music composed by the artist is stripped of any voices, instead, revealing the instrumental harmony and the friction of the different sounds.

Gemma Castro, b. 1996 is a composer, audio engineer, and artist creating at the intersection of sound and architecture. Gemma has self released albums, composed for public television, and is an engineer at Stones Throw Records.

Everything in Air is a series of public programs over the course of a year—new commissions, exhibitions, performances, and forums, often in hybrid combinations—using key concepts within artist and composer Maryanne Amacher’s work as points of departure. The series was supported by a Mike Kelley Foundation Grant.

Patty Gone: The Opposite
2023-01-15 19:00
The Opposite

a Video Art Essay by Patty Gone

with opening acts bySophia Cleary

Aiden Arata

Wall of Ears

about The Opposite:Porn Film Festival Berlin Official Selection 2022Official TrailerWhat do ‘Seinfeld’ and a psychedelic pilgrimage across the US have in common? Gone wades through the history of comedy, eroticism, and hippieness to emerge on the other side with profound truths.

Single channel, 35min.Cast: Patty Gone, Will Darling, Gigi Goñi, Chris LottMusic: Jon Ruseski, Wall of Ears, Illuminating Hearts, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

Patty Gone is the author of Love Life (Mount Analogue, 2019) and director of the video serial, Painted Dreams (2017, 2018, 2020). Her performance and video art has appeared at the Queens Museum, The Poetry Project, Wendy’s Subway, and Smack Mellon, and has received grants and support from the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Mass MoCA, NYU, and Northampton Open Media. She’s currently a PhD student in Performance Studies at UCLA.

Aiden Arata is a writer and artist from Los Angeles. Her writing has been featured in publications including BOMB, Mask, The Rumpus, The Fanzine, Hobart, Wonderland, Alternative Press and NDA: An Autofiction Anthology (Archway Editions 2022).

Sophia Cleary is a performance artist and comedian. She has presented work at Danspace Project, The Kitchen, the Hammer Museum, and more.

Wall of Ears is a Seattle-based musical collective giddy to expand the boundaries of spontaneous feeling through sonic emotive transmissions. Their most recent album is It Is (2022).

Sad Girl Summer
2023-01-13 20:00
Sad Girl Summer is a solo performance by Pau S. Pescador with opening performances and installations by Luna Fisher, Emji Saint Spero and Sammie Veeler.

This event is co-hosted by Art Reality Studio and New Art City .

—

Pau S. Pescador

Sad Girl Summer

Sad Girl Summer is a three-act performance and installation, which is the third iteration of artist and filmmaker’s Hot Girl Summer performance series. After the loss of her elder dog, Ty, a trans Latina, leaves Los Angeles for the summer to reflect upon her past relationships and loss. Through this solo performance, Pescador utilizes costumes, puppets and props to explore her own successes and failures attempting to understand the greater world around her? What responsibilities? It’s summer!

Luna Fisher

thank youUuu bezZzos

queer trans artist luna fisher explores her coming(s) of age through sound, clown, poetry, emotions and etceteras. she is influenced deeply by the real and the unreal forever exploring the space between the two with whimsy in order to clear the path for change. encouraging the audience to participate in any way, luna is cozy in chaos and sees us as one with nature and now technology. expressing the perpetual cycle of elements as the wind emerges from space and blows the dust that meets the water that stokes the fires of creativity that provide the steam to enhance our auras making life more vibrant and expansive for all.

Emji Saint Spero

No blood no glitter no performance of any kind

No blood no glitter no performance no stage no tonite. The list is expansive and the carry is forever. This piece is lurking in afterglow of an LDR with a certain shuttered queer bar in San Francisco. It doesn’t kiss and tell. Welcome to the afters.

Sammie Veeler

A Time Capsule Or A GraveA Time Capsule Or A Grave is a hybrid performance commissioned for Octobre Numérique Faire Monde in Arles, France in October 2022. Veeler activates a 3D virtual space built with New Art City by delivering an IRL lecture as she walks through a projection of the space. The work expounds on Veeler’s personal grief ritual with her late husband’s personal archive, and the role of the virtual in this process. The first iteration of the performance was recorded and the audio was installed in the space at each of the areas she stopped to speak. This can be accessed on desktop at https://newart.city/world/well.

claire rousay | Ben Babbitt
2023-01-08 20:00
The wildly prolific emo ambient musician claire rousay brings new sounds to Human Resources in the new year. Her music zeroes in on personal emotions and the minutiae of everyday life — voicemails, haptics, environmental recordings, stopwatches, whispers and conversations — exploding their significance.

L.A. Based composer and performer Ben Babbitt arranges sound in and for realms physical and virtual, forging works where expression is so forefront, it belies the complex and oftentimes experimental nature of his methods.

Advance tickets available: https://withfriends.co/event/15358293/General_Admission

Presented by UPEND

Sticker
2023-01-07 20:00
Sticker (Michael Gross and Dakota Higgins) was born at the Stonehead Society Headquarters in Gardena, CA, into a heap of Mexican alabaster. For a year, the two lived on beans and kimchi, played nightly, and slept on boulders. While their sound has changed significantly over time, one thing has remained constant: A dedication to improvisation, gymnastics, jizz, and joy. They love you, and hope you love them.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Michael: this Johnny Cash CD SUCKS.”

Doors at 8 and we will probably play at 9?

Hope is a Hammer
2023-01-04 19:30
Hope is a Hammer

Wednesday, January 4, 2023, 7:30pm

“Hope is a Hammer” is an interdisciplinary collaborative performance directed and produced by Sharon Chohi Kim and Elana Mann. Through immersive sound, sculpture, text, and movement, “Hope is a Hammer” confronts the silencing of women’s voices and the struggle for body sovereignty, while offering strategies for collective empowerment. The performance includes music by Sharon Chohi Kim and Corey Fogel, text by Carol Ockman, choreography by Stephanie Zaletel, sculpture and set design by Elana Mann, and costume design by Jill Spector. Kim and Fogel will activate Mann’s sonic sculptures through voice and percussion, along with a group of musicians. They will play hand-horn megaphones, a ten-foot six-person protest horn, and ceramic rattles, culminating with a procession.

Performers: Erin Barnes, Cory Beers, Mikaela Elson, Corey Fogel, Sara Sinclair Gomez, Christopher Hadley, Sharon Chohi Kim, Divya Maus, Carol Ockman, Molly Pease, and Kathryn Shuman

Dead Thoroughbred
2022-12-22 19:00 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
DT a non-band band.

DT never; not happening.

DT heavy evasion—worthless.

DT so goth, born black.

DT at least sidony o’neal and keyon gaskin.

Dead Thoroughbred is presented as part of “Everything in Air”, a series of public programs at Human Resources over the course of a year—new commissions, exhibitions, performances, and forums, often in hybrid combinations—using key concepts within artist and composer Maryanne Amacher’s work as points of departure. The series was supported by a Mike Kelley Foundation Grant.

Like Spiders Spinning Light
2022-12-17 17:00 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
X-TRA Presents: Like Spiders Spinning Light a conversation between David Weldzius, Britt Salvesen, and Jon Leaver, Saturday, December 17th, 2023.

A conversation around “Like Spiders Spinning Light: Reflections on Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach’s Guernica Tapestry at the UN,” written by artist David Weldzius for X-TRA Volume 24, Number 2. During the conversation, Weldzius will be joined by X-TRA Editor Jon Leaver and LACMA Curator Britt Salvesen, who will reflect on the duplication and circulation of the Guernica Tapestry by Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach.

Doors open at 5 pm

Read Weldzius’s essay, “Like Spiders Spinning Light: Reflections on Jacqueline de la Baume Dürrbach’s Guernica Tapestry at the UN” here.

David Weldzius is an artist based in Los Angeles. He has exhibited at Kordansky Gallery, MAK Center, and Stephen Cohen Gallery, among other venues. In 2012, he was an artist resident at the Terra Foundation of American Art in Giverny, France. His work is in the collection of the California Museum of Photography. David’s work has received critical attention from writer Jan Tumlir and art historian Eric Mazariegos, Jr. To date, David has published two essays with X-TRA. David teaches courses in photography and printmaking at Occidental College, Los Angeles.

Britt Salvesen is the curator and department head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints & Drawings Department at LACMA. Recent exhibitions include *3D: Double Vision* (2018) and *City of Cinema: Paris 1850–1907* (with Leah Lehmbeck and Vannessa R. Schwartz, 2022).

Jon Leaver is a Professor of Art History at the University of La Verne, and editor for X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal. Born in the UK where he studied and began his teaching career, he moved to California 20 years ago. His research covers a wide range of art history and visual culture from nineteenth-century French painting to the contemporary art of Los Angeles. He has written extensively on the painter Édouard Manet, and the art critic Charles Baudelaire, as well as subjects as diverse as the aesthetics of soccer and the history of World’s Fairs and Expositions.

Sam Rowell: Call Of The Chromophore
2022-12-09 06:00 - 2022-12-16 07:00 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
UPEND Presents
SAM ROWELL:CALL OF THE CHROMOPHOREA series of performances in light and sound
December 9-16
Final Performances: Friday December 16, 8PM & 10PM
FREE
Limited Capacity / Prompt arrival recommended
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“An abstract investigation into the quantum nature of color and the relationship between perception, metaphysics, and language”
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With a site-specific installation of lights, and an array of audio electronics, Sam Rowell navigates trips through undulating fields of color, flurries of flash, and patches of pitch darkness. Simultaneously improvising sequences of deep hues and alien soundscapes, hers is an expansive practice of perceptual play – literally spectacular and sensational.
For Call of the Chromophore, Rowell has created within Human Resources an ad hoc theatre of light and sound to stage a series of 8 performances over the course of 8 days, at 8pm each evening. Each show comes with a tasty title – and a heady introduction – providing a set and setting for the journey. Exploring themes around electromagnetic radiation and the cosmos, Rowell is also literally playing with the material of such, bouncing photons off the wall to explore specific frequencies of visible light, and – of course – vibrations within the human range of hearing.
Rowell’s preference for group reception and live performance are key to her inquiry into the subjective. Rather than just color itself, her palette includes the varied perceptions of audience members’ sensations of color. How do we talk about what we see? Do we see the same thing, or are words a compromise to forge a consensus reality?
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Sam Rowell lives and plays in Los Angeles. Recent solo light and sound performances include: Dissolving the Sky, Hunter Shaw Fine Arts (2021); Dark Energy & Spectral Redshift: A History of the Universe, as told by Cosmic Radiation, Dem Passwords & And/Or Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Looking Through the Gravity Lens: An Evocation of Sound as Radiant Energy, Work Related, Austin, TX (2019); Trichromatic Phenomena in the Service of Induced Color, Eternal 30 Festival, Houston, TX (2019). Rowell is the bassist for celebrated radical improv duo Eloe Omoe, produces the live sound collage broadcast Special Collections, and is part of the creative and engineering team of Lookout FM.
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Friday December 9The Electromagnetic Enigma
Saturday December 10Wells of Poison, Columns of Smoke
Sunday December 11Newton Invented Indigo
Monday December 12Lovecraftian Perceptual Color Theory
Tuesday December 13Earth People: Controlled by Gamma Light
Wednesday December 14Color Confusion
Thursday December 15Roses are Red, Violets are Blue: Blackbody Radiation as it Relates to Hue
Friday December 16, 8PMWhite Light Unimagined by Dark Matter
Friday December 16, 10PMThe Bringer of Night Borne Intelligence

Walk Out UC Strike Fundraiser
2022-11-30 19:00 - 22:00
Join us for a fundraiser sale of artworks by MFA students to support the UC academic worker strike. There will be a cash bar, performances, live sound, and other refreshments. All works are 200 dollars. 100 percent of all proceeds collected will be donated to a specific fund providing relief to students impacted by the strike. Help striking workers hold the picket-line.
ARTISTS
Carlos Agredano
Zack Benson
Antonio Bever
Brian Bowman
John Burlte
William Camargo
Misha Davydov
Alex Delapena
Anastasia Denos
Grant Frederick Speich
Lauren Goldenberg
Emily Babette Gross
Michael James Gross
Norma Hernandez Peña
Inès Kivimäki
Laura Li
Alberto Lule
Maria Mathioudakis
Acacia Marable
Davora Martine
Anthony Martinez Galvan
Brice Matisse James
Andy Montiel-Phillips
Alyssa Rogers
Jamie Ross
Eddie Salinas
Cielo Saucedo
Josh Schaedel
Ellen Schafer
Liz Stringer
Joshua Thomen
Ago Visconti
Devin Wilson
Christopher Yang
MUSICIANS
Dakota Higgins
Micheal James Gross
Spencer Pepke

Jimena Sarno: aeolian
2022-11-04 00:00 - 2022-11-20 23:59
Opening Reception:

Friday, November 4*, 6PM – 9PM

Gallery Hours: Wed – Sun noon-6PM,

Mon – Tues by appointment

“I can make wind,” Gluskabe admitted shamefacedly, “but I can’t make it stay.”

Then God blew, so powerfully that Gluskabe fell down and lost all his hair.

–Genesis Volume 1 (Memoria del Fuego) Eduardo Galeano

Considering how sound travels, aeolian thinks through wind and breathing as manifestations of air as sound. The installation takes inspiration from the significance of wind in mythology. Taking its title from Aeolus – the keeper of the wind in Greek mythology and his gift of a calm wind as a ‘safe return home,’ – it reflects on power distribution, breath as lifeforce, and sovereignty. The installation brings together four hand-felted horn speakers pointing at the four directions. The four speakers play a composition with songs performed by vocal artists, from which only the breathing sounds of inspiration have been isolated. While the inspiring sounds appear to be pulling the air out of the space, the felted speakers absorb some of the sound vibrations, accentuating the senses both through the tactile process of making the work and its experience with the viewer’s breathing in the space.

Vocal artists:

Gemma Castro

Rosa Evangelina Beltrán

Maya Paredes

Molly Pease

Jimena Sarno is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Buenos Aires, Argentina. With a focus on spatial and sonic experience she works across a range of media including installation, sound, video, text and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at MASS MoCA, 18th Street Arts Center, LACE, Vincent Price Art Museum, Visitor Welcome Center, The Museum of Latin American Art, The Mistake Room, Human Resources and San Diego Art Institute, among others. A recipient of the 2021 California Arts Council Individual Fellowship, she is a 2019-2023 Lucas Artist Fellow in Visual Arts at Montalvo Art Center. She is Assistant Professor of Art at California State University Dominguez Hills.

Everything in Air

Human Resources LA presents Everything in Air, a series of public programs over the course of a year—new commissions, exhibitions, performances, and forums, often in hybrid combinations—using key concepts within artist and composer Maryanne Amacher’s work as points of departure. The series was supported by a Mike Kelley Foundation Grant.

Featured photo by Christopher Wormald

Geneva Skeen - Channels (#1 Pittsburgh / Los Angeles)
2022-10-18 - 2022-10-21 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
open gallery hours: tuesday-thursday noon-7pm
Channels (#1 Pittsburgh/Los Angeles) is a technical cover-song to artist and composer Maryanne Amacher‘s City Links series, adapted for a high-speed interconnected world of streaming, liveness, and hybridity. This project, similar to Amacher’s original, brings together live hi-fidelity audio from multiple sites into a new situation. Here, the sites happen to be multiple water channels amidst constructed industrial infrastructure—the Los Angeles, Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers.
The sounds from remote spots along these bodies of water coalesce at the separate, third site of Human Resources. Using two portable A/V stations consisting of high-speed mobile wifi hotspots, solar paneled power–banks, condenser mics linked to mobile camera phones, and audio software, the resonant concrete architecture at HR becomes a hub and amplifier for ongoing signal receipt—a live mix for place, perception, and waters to recombine in presence and present-time.
Artists and musicians from each location have been invited to “join” the audio stream throughout the installation as follows:
October 18: Patrick Shiroishi (LA)
October 19: Machine Listener (Pittsburgh)
Geneva Skeen is an artist and composer. Influenced by écriture féminine, alchemical metaphors, and a range of musical traditions ranging from holy mysticism to industrial, Skeen works with sound, voice, architecture, video, sculpture, and software. Her recordings, performances, publications, and installations focus on site-specific landscape studies as a means to highlight complex interdependencies between perception, attention, and trauma. Through linkages made between our finite physical landscapes and their infinitely permutable digital representations, these works explore qualities of embodiment amidst climate catastrophe and late capitalism. Skeen has released musical works on Room40, LINE Imprint, Touch, Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and Crystalline Morphologies, which have been reviewed in The Wire Magazine, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, Foxy Digitalis, and others. She has presented work at LAXART, the Broad Museum, Open Space SFMOMA, LAND AND SEA, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, the Center for New Music San Francisco, REDCAT, and LACMA. She was the founding curator of Sequencing, an online transmedia publication series for Fulcrum Arts which explores the intersection of art, science, and social change, and is a member of VOLUME—a curatorial collective focused on sound and time-based practices. She is currently an Adjunct Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.
www.genevaskeen.com

Channels (#1 Pittsburgh/Los Angeles) is presented at Human Resources as part of Everything in Air, a series of public programs over the course of a year—new commissions, exhibitions, performances, and forums, often in hybrid combinations—using key concepts within artist and composer Maryanne Amacher’s work as points of departure.

This project was supported in part by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Further Fund, and a Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Artist Project Grant.

HRLA Divas Live!
2022-10-14 19:00 - 2022-10-15 23:30
A two night gala for HRLA: October 14th & 15th

featuring performances by
Amelia Bande, Nikki D, Dorian Wood, Amanda Faye Jimenez, Jasmine Nyende, Sebastian Hernandez, Xandra Ibarra, Page Person, Emily Lucid, rafa esparza, Pau Pescador, TMO, Creepypasta Puttanesca, Jessica Emmanuel, and Carmina Escobar .

Tickets available here

Haig Papazian: 1000 strings at rest / this song is currently not available (in exile)
2022-10-01 20:30 - 22:00 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
كان يا ما كان
կար ու չկար
there was and there wasn’t
Over two days, Haig Papazian will build a new machine/instrument which he will play on Saturday, Oct 1.
Doors open at 8:30pm, performance at 9:00pm.
Haig Papazian (beirut 1986) is an artist, composer, and performer whose body of work include architecture, music, composition, performance art, storytelling, and multimedia installations. His most recent body of work explores and challenges the multifaceted meanings of what makes a home, and ways in which this story could be told. Variations of his Space Time Tuning Machine project have been presented at Joe’s Pub in New York, SXSW in Austin, and The Broad Museum in LA.
Haig is a founding member and violinist of Mashrou’ Leila, the Lebanese band whose electro-pop anthems about political freedom, race, gender and modern Arabic identity have questioned the status quo of the Middle-Eastern music industry. They have performed at sold out venues and festivals around the world. The band has recently collaborated with MIKA, Hercules and Love Affair, Yo-Yo Ma and Joe Goddard from Hot Chip. With a musical career that spans 13 years, Haig has been an artist in residence at NYU, campaigned with Greenpeace in an initiative to promote solar energy and participated in the BLOCK 9 & BANKSY Creative Retreat alongside fellow musicians Brian Eno and Roisin Murphy, and has performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of Oliver Beer’s Vessel Orchestra. He has held public talks at NYU, Columbia University, Concordia, Dartmouth College and Sciences Po in Paris.
Haig has been a grantee of Sundance institute’s 2021 Interdisciplinary artist fund, selected SHIM:NYC 2021 resident artist at Westbeth in New York. and the public theater’s New York Voices Commission recipient from Joe’s Pub, and has completed residencies at Brooklyn College center for the performing arts, The LAB residency at Long wharf theater, and Greenwich house Uncharted residency.
His most recent writings include an op-Ed in the New York Times, and essays in The Guardian, and France Culture. He is based out of Queens in New York, with his cat Beau.

fault lines
2022-09-23 - 2022-09-25
fault lines

Friday, September 23rd at 7 pm
Saturday, September 24th at 2 pm and at 7 pm

Tickets can be purchased here

fault lines: activation #3 at Human Resources Los Angeles

Human Resources will host Bay Area based dance company pateldanceworks and the spirit Blue CHiLD. in a week-long experimental movement residency that culminates in three performances from Sept 23-24, 2022. pateldanceworks and Blue CHiLD. have been collaborating on an ongoing, emergent, multidisciplinary series of performances and experiential activations entitled fault lines. Each offering emerges from its last evolution, and includes different constellations of members tethered to pateldanceworks. This iteration of fault lines at Human Resources is performed by Bhumi B Patel and Elizabeth Sugawara. It is a ritual portal – a doorway across generations and geography, a metaphorical opening of the earth returning us home. Together, they ask: What does it mean to make home and migrate, as the earth burns and the ground beneath our feet continues to orient and re-orient? How do we find and create stability for one another, and for the planet, during rapid change, irreversible loss?

fault lines has been performed at RoundAntennae (Berkeley, CA) and Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference (Manoa, HI) and will be shown at Urban Arts Space/Hybrid Arts Lab (Columbus, OH) later this year. In 2023, the work will be performed outdoors at Fort Funston in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (San Francisco, CA).

pateldanceworks (PDW) is directed by Bhumi B Patel, a queer, desi, home-seeker, science fiction choreographer, movement artist and writer (she/they). In its purest form, her performance works for PDW are a love letter to her ancestors. PDW moves at the intersection embodied research and generating new futures, using improvisational practice as a pursuit for liberation.

Elizabeth Sugawara (she/they) is a dance artist and movement maker, currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at The Ohio State University. She is a multi-layered, ever curious artist who enjoys the feeling of making, the attentive focus, and awareness that goes into creating a world. She dances to honor her ancestors, actively listen to surrounding ecosystems, and to allow the ripples of internal sensations to seep to the external. She understands movement practice as a multisensory, multitasking activity and is interested in researching the constant patterns and movement transitions in her kinesthetic, improvisational process. Elizabeth questions through movement and storytelling: What does generous intentional adapting and active listening look like within improvisation as a performer?

Blue CHiLD. is a vibe and a spirit. Born from a blue plant and the dust you carry beneath your feet, they are both here and there, everywhere and nowhere. They are shy and jealous, irreverent and feral, creative and always pregnant, but never a mother. They are most expressive when they find themselves in relation to optimal sentience. Blue CHiLD. is limitless, spiritual, post-lingual, in process, in feeling, nebulous, on their journey, and in love.

Hanieh Khatibi: Space has always reduced me to silence
2022-09-09 17:30 - 2022-09-10 22:00 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
Friday, September 9th 5:30pm — Saturday, September 10th 11pm

Space has always reduced me to silence is a site-specific, durational performance that explores the politics of domestic space and the threshold of the personal. From dawn to dusk, artist Hanieh Khatibi will attempt to bind over 10,000 yards of thread around her childhood home before unraveling. The performance will be live streamed in its entirety at HRLA.

Hanieh Khatibi (b.1985, Tehran, Iran) is an LA-based artist whose work considers the continuity, resistance, agency and interrelationships that exist in nature and society through sculpture, performance, and video. Her work has been exhibited at the Echo Park Film Center, Track 16, Commons LA, Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery, CalArts, among others. Khatibi was a participant of the 2020 ArtCenter DTLA Residency Project, Love’s Remedies.
Special thanks to Vardui Sharapkhanyan for curating, Javid Ghaem Maghami, Bita Fayyazi, Pouya Parsamagham, Mohsen Shahmardi, Fardin Ali-Asghari, Ahmad Khatibi, and Sodabeh Amini who made the project possible.
Space has always reduced me to silence is funded in part by the Foundation for the Arts, Emergency Grant.
The performance takes its title from a line in The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.

FORCED LEISURE by Kyle Patrick Roberts
2022-09-07 20:30 - 22:00
FORCED LEISURE by Kyle Patrick Roberts is a series of nine vignettes performed in parts by an ensemble cast. Exploring an individual’s informed and uninformed autonomy within perceived dimensions of freedom and choice, conscious or unconscious role-play within these structures, the protocol of these actions, and their consequences/effect.

Very Be Careful -- Silver Anniversary
2022-08-26 - 2022-09-05
Very Be Careful — 25th Anniversary Celebration & Photo Exhibition
August 26 – September 4
Very Be Careful, the Vanguards of Vallenato for Los Angeles, celebrate their 25th year together with a photo exhibition and celebration at Human Resources LA in Chinatown. VBC friend and official photographer, Keith Sirchio, has been shooting the VBC scene since 1999 from Coast to Coast and across the Seas. Sirchio’s photography traces the band’s earliest moments living in New York, touring Japan, and up to the present at their home in Los Angeles.

Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 1pm-6pm
Opening reception Friday August 26th, 2022
7pm-12am
Full Bar
Musical Performances by:
Very Be Careful
El Haru Kuroi
and Featuring:
Las Sucias Social Club
Marionettes – La Smiley & El Triste
DJs – Linda Nuves & Cisco
Reception tickets $25 available

Adventure has never been a task for VBC. A Caribbean soul and a California heart have sustained two decades of ceaseless romp-downs and raucous times for L.A.’s vallenato veteranos, inciting 10s of 1000s of men, women, children, and even some wild animals, to boogie to the Colombian coastal beat. From the debaucherous streets of: Austin’s SXSW, Germany’s WorldCupTour ’06, L.A.’s Sunset Junction Street Fair; to the cultural pinnacles of: Chicago’s Summer Dance Series, New York’s Central Park Summer stage, L.A.s’ Grand Performances & Levitt Pavilion, London’s Hammersmith Apollo; colossal concerts: L.A. Sports Arena Cumbia Fest, Glastonbury Music Festival & Bestival UK, Fuji Rock Festival & Asagiri Jam Japan; clubs and hubs: N.Y.’s SOBs, L.A.’s HOBs, backyard BBQs, Very Be Careful has tamed the beasts within or unleashed the ones without, helping to popularize the beauty of the 1950s-1970s sound of Colombian vallenato and cumbia.
Bootlegged across the Americas, pumped in the clubs, and ripped in cyberspace and the airwaves around the world, VeryBeCareful forges ahead globetrotting alongside legends and antiheros: Joe Strummer, Alfredo Gutierrez, Antibalas, Carlos Vives, Grupo Niche, Kronos Quartet, Gogol Bordello, Buena Vista Social Club, Jack White, Celso Piña, Vampire Weekend, Fruko Y Sus Tesos. Their infamous fifteen year traditions hosting old school “dances” for Valentine’sDay, NewYear’s Eve, 20 de Julio, Halloween, and the legendary July Fourth Brooklyn “Cumbia Under The Sparks” rooftop affair, has brought together people from around the globe itchin’ for those early roots sounds that prove a stripped down parranda is the fiercest and funnest way to party.

Keith Sirchio moved to New York in 1992 to study cinematography at the School of Visual Arts. He began working as a camera operator on independent films and music videos from the likes of Elliott Smith to Wu-tang Clan, but soon found himself more intrigued taking stills of what was happening behind the scenes; between the takes. Since then, Keith was chosen for a residency program at the Camera Club of New York, interned at the prestigious Magnum Photos Agency and has photographed album covers for music labels such as Universal Decca, Epitaph and Fat Beats. His work has been featured in Hamburger Eyes and Upper Playground’s “Backyard Shakedown” along with dozens of other publications. His most recent solo exhibition, “Soft Tissue, Hard Bones” at Lorimoto Gallery in NYC documented Muay Thai fighters from 2015-2017 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Keith met Very Be Careful by chance at a Brooklyn loft party they crashed over 20 years ago, just a few months after they migrated from the West. His lens has been capturing their Cumbia capers ever since.

All images by Keith Sirchio

Casey Kauffmann & John de Leon Martin
2022-08-06 - 2022-08-21
Human Resources LA presents a two person show of painting, drawing, video, and sculpture by visual artists Casey Kauffmann and John de Leon Martin.
The exhibition opens Saturday, August 6th from 6-9pm and will run until Saturday, August 20th. Gallery hours: Wed-Sun, 12-6pm.

This show was initiated by Jeann Bofwel, who saw similarities in the maximalist fascination with pleasure and suffering in both Kauffmann and Martin’s work. Both Martin and Kauffmann take on the dual roles of critic and fan, investigating media consumption as an interpersonal act. While Kauffmann’s digital video collages utilize images from reality television and other limitless online resources to examine culture’s relationship with the feminine, Martin’s paintings and drawings, largely inspired by his love of Dungeons and Dragons, employ fantasy tropes to create sites of queer possibility and pain. The landscapes of California, both emotional and actual, also loom subtextually in both artist’s work- They appear in the faces of Kauffman’s Hollywood stars and the Redwood Dryad that centers Martin’s oil painting If You Were a Tree, What Kind of Tree Would You Be?

Perhaps the greatest commonality between Martin and Kauffmann is that they are both collagists, constantly mining from the media and experiences they love. In 19th and early 20th century Europe, in works like the Cottingley Fairy photographs or the collages of Lady Filmer, collage was a format utilized by mostly female artists to evoke the otherworldly and call into question the treachery of images. It was considered a hobbyist craft not to be taken too seriously by the artistic elite. But why? Perhaps because a recurring mode of western art has been to present art works as the product of a singular artist who in solitude plumbs each creative idea from the depths of their genius. Collage, with its direct acknowledgement that not everything in an artwork is created by the artist, instead points to the interrelated nature of life. Perhaps in some ways this threatens that aforementioned premise of artistic solitude? It is Kauffmann and Martin’s hope that you will feel threatened by this show in similar ways.

Casey Kauffmann is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, installation, video, and a variety of digital mediums. She is a lecturer at the University of California San Diego. Kauffmann was born in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, California in 1989. She lives and works in Oceanside, California and received her MFA from The University of Southern California in 2020 and her Bachelor of Arts from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Her work has been featured in publications such as Artnet, Artillery, LAWeekly, The New Yorker, I-D Vice, and Hyperallergic. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally in galleries such as Transfer Gallery, Centro de Cultura Digital, the Brand Library in Glendale, Lyles and King, Coaxial, Arebyte, Cirrus, and more. Kauffmann’s collage Instagram project @uncannysfvalley, which she started in 2014, features digital collage works and GIFs created using only her iPhone. The pieces Kauffmann posts to this account are an ever-accumulating collection of material from all corners of the internet, sourced from Tumblr, Instagram, and Google. This Instagram account and body of work has been exhibited in many galleries, written about in several esteemed publications, and led to her admission to the MFA program at the University of Southern California. Kauffmann’s drawing practice functions as an inquiry into the representation of femme emotion and hysteria in both art history and popular culture.

John “Johnnie JungleGuts” de Leon Martin is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, installation, painting, and performance. Martin was born in Riverton, New Jersey in 1987. He lives and works in Highland Park, Los Angeles and received his Bachelor of Arts from California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Martin’s primary goal as an artist is to express enthusiasm and hope, although he has also started to allow feelings of anxiety and fear to be present in his visual art. As a result, Martin’s work often straddles the line between artist and fan. He curated a cosplay fashion show and a panel discussion on Pokemon as part of Kchung Radio’s Hammer Museum Residency and Made In LA exhibition. Martin is also a fan of animals- he has volunteered hands on with a variety of primates, canids, turtles, and cats both big and small. In 2011 Martin was awarded the Michelle Lund artist’s residency at Earthfire Institute Wildlife Sanctuary in Idaho. His work has been displayed at MOCA Geffen, Night Gallery, Machine Project, and on an episode of A&E’s Storage Wars where he appraised a collection of My Little Ponies. His work has been featured in publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, and Art in America. He has been a frequent guest lecturer at Calarts and was a guest lecturer at Cornell University in 2021. In his work for this show Martin utilizes fairies, preternatural beings which are a part of nature but mysterious to society at large, as a metonym for being gay.

Poetry at HRLA
2022-07-29 19:00 - 21:00
HRLA presents a night of poetry this Friday, July 29th at 7pm with the poets:
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
Kata De la Rosa
Lupita Limón Corrales
Viva Padilla
*A 5 dollar donation is encouraged*
Masks are encouraged inside the gallery.

Fidelia Lam - New seed. XXXXXX. New seed. XXXXXX.
2022-07-23 - 2022-08-01 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
Opening: Saturday July 23, 2022, 7-10pm
On view weds-sun 12-6pm, July 23-31 and by appointment.
New seed. XXXXXX. New seed. XXXXXX. grapples with the affective and aesthetic legacies of empire and colonialism as they continue to shape the racial architectures of Asian diasporic femme subjectivities. The exhibition features new multimedia works that speak to, with, and nearby speculative ancestral figures, drawing on Anne Anlin Cheng’s theory of ornamentalism to create sites for grieving, honoring, and queering modes of synthetic personhood. Playing with recursive processes and speculative rituals, the pieces arrive in formations of plastics, light, and digital technologies to meditate on the racializations of matter and inter-textual modes of being.
Dear Ghost in my Shell which points are we passing pass by reference only please Dear wiring and connections our encodings have too many channels and have started to fray Dear OS update to use new features we are made obsolete our ram is getting slower Dear Major you are enmeshed with the synthetic sentience of the Puppets teach me your navigational practices Dear Minor Dear Method Dear Margaret, have you found your robot yet? Would you help me find mine? Look at my errors at my seams at my torn pixels they might point the way
Fidelia Lam is a Canadian multimedia artist and scholar whose work attends to the shared ground of Asian/American diaspora, aesthetics, technology, and urban space through recursive assemblages of code, animation, projection, sound, bodies, and critical inquiry.
(image: Still from when stillness culminates (2022), interactive installation.)

Soft Trace/Line Break
2022-07-15 19:30 - 21:00 | Human Resources LA, 410 Cottage Home, Los Angeles, CA, 90012
Poetry

efren castro

aimee goguen

gennyvera pacheco

p staff
