The exhibition We’ve got the Numbers, was scheduled to open March 19, 2020. The work was being installed, posters were printed, performers were rehearsing and then New York City went into lockdown. The show was cancelled and postponed until .... nobody knew. Instead of waiting for some as-yet-unknown future date to re-book the show, we found another way.
Songs for Presidents is very pleased to announce that we are producing a hand-printed full color book of the work, and screening the new filmed performance piece from Dirty Churches. We are making this book because we want to get this work out there. A book will have a longer life than an exhibition, possibly reach more people, and is affordable and accessible to all. It was important to restage the performance in the gallery, as physical spaces have energy of their own. The future of the Songs for Presidents basement, which carries a history with the late Genesis P Orridge, is uncertain. Dirty Churches rose to the occasion, and inhabited the space with the creation of Rumples.
In pictures that are unexpected, fresh and loaded with detail, Nikki Johnson and Zero provide a time capsule of life before Covid. These two artists worked in places where photographs were private exchanges in places fundamentally public: the city’s streets and nightclubs. Looking at their work from our current vantage point, there is a wistful feeling. Presenting it now is marking a very particular moment in NYC history. Because it is... history.
In Nikki Johnson’s photographs, made between 1999 - 2010, the underground is very much alive. A self-described “social explorer”, Johnson’s images lead viewers through places we’ve all been or, perhaps, would never go; dank bars in neon-lit after-hours, cluttered apartments, occupied beds, dungeons. Before the undead became trendy, Johnson covered the vampire parties in NYC where Hip Hop mingled freely with Goth, and fashions were a mashup of victorian, fetish, and street wear. She covered Peepshow and the BDSM scene, publishing in Screw and Hustler. She documented bloodstained sidewalks throughout the city, scars and black eyes. Working as a forensic photographer in NYC Johnson cannot be rattled, and her work conveys a sense of empathy for all the ways that people live in the world. The young vampire couple she photographs, or the stripper after a show, they are self-conscious but greet the photographer with familiarity, they are not presenting themselves to an outsider.
Zero found her images (made between 2015 and early 2020) by walking, sometimes all night, the streets of the Lower East Side she has known all her life. It is an archaeology, a search for vestiges of a lost history, a constant hunt for “moments that are alive and electric and real. I love these things. They feel like home.” They are everywhere just hard to find in the whirlwind, lost because everyone is looking at their phones. Having experienced the neighborhood through the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, the living history of the tenement buildings and the storefronts and bodegas are like bodily memories. She follows ghosts around, fascinated by the things people do and leave behind, the endlessly creative ways they find to exist in the city. Nowhere is this more evident than in her payphone series. A fire extinguisher, mysterious stacks of pennies, books, a wide assortment of containers for urine, every item opaque, an unanswered question. Phone booths are repurposed as small sanctuaries, impromptu offices, a welcome private space on the rushing street, and the recipients of every type of baffling vandalism. “People still use them for calls. I see it all the time” she says.
Rumples is a new performance video by Dirty Churches, filmed at Songs for Presidents on Sepember 12, 2020, featuring Alexandra Jacob and Rachel Blackwell, music by Jesse Gelaznik. Dirty Churches was scheduled to perform at Songs For Presidents on March 19th 2020. That didn’t happen. Starting on Friday March 13th life changed for New Yorkers and a lot of other people around the world. This piece was birthed of the crushing anxiety that controlled our thoughts and actions for months and continues to do so. Alienation, fear of contagion, and the decline and death of the body haunt Rumples. The imagery and horror film soundtrack is a reflection of the dark thoughts that Dirty Churches has felt during this time of COVID. This video is also a sign of the times for performance art in general, what is it if it’s not live? The future of Songs for Presidents is unknown, and the piece may be an elegy for a certain basement in Bushwick. With Rumples, Dirty Churches has blended performance documentation with installation and video art to create a vivid nightmare of searching shadows, twisting figures and looming masked creatures.
Rumples will be available to screen from October 8 to November 5 via the Songs for Presidents website.
Hand printed on the Risograph in collaboration with PrintCache in Detroit, the pre-orders for the 30-page limited edition book open on October 8 via the Songs for Presidents website. The Risograph is a duplicator manufactured by Riso Kagaku Corporation in Japan. Risographs are a direct descendent of the mimeograph, though they are often referred to as an intersection of screen printing, photocopying, and offset printing. The pre-order includes the 24” x 30” poster from the exhibition and a 5” x 7” still from Rumples.
Dirty Churches (formed by Jesse Gelaznik and Rachel Blackwell) is a New York based performance art collective that explores the intersections of myth, ritual and music through theatrical performances. Their opera ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS conjured an ethereal world composed of magical genies, dancing witches and shape-shifting cockroaches and was performed for a sold-out three night run at La MaMa Galleria in June of 2019. They have also collaborated with the choreographer and dancer Alexandra Jacob and her partner Constantine Alexis to create the radical ballet EATER OF HEARTS, which was performed at The Williamsburg Art and Historical Center in 2018. In addition to large collaborative performances Dirty Churches have also presented minimal performances as a duo for PROTECTION CIRCLE, which was performed at Gavin Brown Enterprises in 2018. In addition to the listed performances Dirty Churches has performed at such NYC venues as Westbeth, White Box, Capsule Gallery, Picasso Machinery, Soho20 Chelsea Gallery, 92Y Tribeca, Brooklyn Fire Proof, the Tarot Society and Art Helix.
Born on the Lower East Side and raised by that neighborhood’s hip hop and punk community, Zero currently lives and works in the now legalized 6th street squat. She is self-taught, her early sensibilities formed by 80’s graffiti and Hip Hop, the Ramones, Black Flag, the Damned, and her mother’s Salsa and Supremes records. Accepted into ICP’s Documentary Practices and Visual Journalism program in 2017 but unable to attend because of the high cost, she went instead to LaGuardia Community College where she is finishing a Commercial Photography degree. Her work has been shown in NYC at Theater for the New City, The Clemente, Rivington Music Rehearsal Studios, and featured in Brooklyn vs. Hackney at Hackney Picture House, London.
Nikki Johnson has exhibited portraits and documentary photography widely in the US and Europe. She holds a Masters degree in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY as well as a Bachelors of Fine Art degree from Mississippi University for Women. Johnson was the first photographer ever admitted to Henry Street Settlement’s Artist in Resident program and was also an invited participant in Fictive Days, a Berlin art residency. Her photographs included in the show Back to Haunt the Hell out of You were described as “disturbing and moving” by New York Times writer Holland Cotter. She is also a forensic photographer in New York City.
Johnson has produced two monographs: Natural History (2010) and We Buy Gold (2014). Her work was recently showcased in 2019’s Black Jelly, a book of poetry by Melanie Maria Goodreaux.