Presenting Roxy Dazzles
Leif Lee, Jonathan Eric Gann, Manny Layers
June 26 - July 19, 2014
Outdoors
Opening night performance
Opening night performance
White Box
Parlor
Roxxy Dazzles exists as a mask for three artists: Manny Layers, Leif J. Lee, Jonathan Eric Gann. This mask allows us to highlight queerness in what we create, through our practice, and in our bodies in order to align ourselves with the queer opaque. The queer opaque is empowerment. It is a collective face. It is a queer face. It is the unified face that casts an unflinching and unapologetic gaze back at heteronormative expectations of identity.
Roxxy Dazzles is the music that lets us dance. She is bright lights. He is firecrackers. They are both the past and the future.
Through Roxxy Dazzles we feel moved to make the collection of works presented in this exhibition in order to reclaim agency against hetero-censorship.”
Bios
Leif J. Lee received a MFA in Visual Studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2014. Leif grew up in Bellingham WA and spent the young adult years of life in Olympia WA, and earned a BA from the Evergreen State College. Leif works with sculpture, drawing, and the fabric arts to depict the queer contemporary landscape. Leif is actively working within new experiences and mediums in effort to unlock the mysterious queer potential of all materials.
http://leifjlee.tumblr.com
Manny Layers is a Queer, Chicano, interdisciplinary artist who exposes identity and challenges gender through his video, performance, conceptual and visual art. Born in Las Vegas, Layers studied film and theater at Hunter College in NYC and is currently pursuing an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice at Portland State University. Layers is Director of the fledgling student organization Time Arts Club, and is a longstanding member of Portland’s experimental music scene, performing in Atole and organizing countless events.
http://mannylayers.tumblr.com
Jonathan Eric Gann is a visual artist based in Portland, OR by way of Birmingham, AL. He earned his BFA in studio art from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2012 and recently graduated from Pacific Northwest College of Art with his MFA. His work is concerned with the powers of possibility and queered space.
http://jonathanericgann.com
Links to Research, Documentation, and Online Exhibitions
-Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation, "Fashioning Personae: Collage, Gender, and Feminism ," YouTube. 26 October 2013,.
-Ben Valentine, "Weaponizing Our Faces: An Interview with Zach Blas," VICE, 10 July 2014,
-Tumblr Posts,
