Enjoy excerpts from works by a few poets featured in "DISGUST: unhealthy practices"
Toni Oswald is a writer, singer, and visual artist who has performed and shown her work across the United States and Europe. She has released four albums under the altar ego The Diary of Ic Explura & writing publications include The Oyez Review, Bombay Gin, Heroes are Gang Leaders Giantology, The Tattered Press, Zani UK, & Shame Radiant, among others. She is currently working on a novel about a girl clown set in the 1950s entitled The Gorgeous Funeral, as well as a collection of short stories set in Los Angeles called Dying on the Vine. Her book Sirens, was released by Gesture Press in 2020. She likes gold teeth, cats, and trees, and lives with her husband Max, and their cats Kiki Pamplemousse Fontaine and Charlie Chaplin in Boulder, Colorado.
Max Davies grew up fascinated by sound and music. In addition to his solo work, his music has been featured in films, at NYC Fashion week, spoken-word collaborations and dance productions. He has been fortunate to work with sonic luminaries and linguistic magicians such as Thurston Moore, Anne Waldman, Lydia Lunch, Toni Oswald, CA Conrad, John Trudell, LAPCAT, Clark Coolidge, Steven Taylor, Junior Burke, Ic Explura, Gregory Alan Isakov and many more.
Sarah Elizabeth Schantz is primarily a fiction writer living with her family on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado in a Victorian-era farmhouse where they are surrounded by open sky, coyote, and century-old cottonwoods. Her novel Fig debuted from Simon and Schuster in 2015 and was selected by NPR as a Best Read of the Year before winning a Colorado Book Award in 2016. Sarah teaches creative writing and literature at Naropa University, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and through her own workshop series (W)rites of Passage. She is currently working on two novels and a short story collection.
Jade Lascelles is a writer, editor, musician, and letterpress printer based in Boulder, Colorado. Selections of her work have appeared in journals, anthologies, films, and visual arts exhibits. She was included in the 2022 Bologna in Lettere festival this spring.
Eric Shoemaker is an interdisciplinary poet, artist, and scholar. He holds a Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Louisville and an MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. He is the author of three poetry books: Ca'Venezia (2021, Partial Press), We Knew No Mortality (2018, Acta Publications), and 30 Days Dry (2015, Thought Collection Publishing).
Emji Saint Spero is a writer, performer, and pervert living in Los Angeles. They are curious about the potential of creative intimacies. Through movement and collaborative performance they seek to find embodied modes of connection, to queer the familiar, mapping the boundaries of collective engagement. Saint Spero is the author of disgust and almost any shit will do. They co-founded the Oakland-based small press and queer poetry cult Timeless, Infinite Light with Joel Gregory. With Lauren Levin, were co-developmental editor for We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, which was awarded the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction. Learn more at saintspero.com.
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DISGUST: unhealthy practices" April 7th - June 28th 2022 , a group exhibit curated by Todd Edward Herman, filmmaker, photographer and founding director of east window, is the culmination of an open call for work by nearly one hundred writers and visual artists around the world.
DISGUST is often seen as the bridge between our moral imperatives and the wilds of survival; the cusp of emotion and instinct. Activated in response to what we perceive or imagine as revolting, sick, infectious, diseased, contaminated and thereby threatening, disgust signals our awareness of fissures between feelings of safety and peril, stability and insecurity; of disjunctions that threaten facets of our personal identity and society at large.
Our collective actions relative to our experiences of disgust often bear witness to damaging prejudices and rhetorics, which attempt to conflate those who we perceive as different from ourselves, socially, culturally, politically, sexually, religiously, in age or ability, with vectors of physical or moral contamination. To be clear, this project aims to confront, subvert and transform these prejudices, not reinforce them.
The images and texts which comprise this international group exhibit freely explore issues of bodily function, ownership, control, choice or lack thereof. We see works grappling with violated physical and social borders and hierarchies; the violation of gender boundaries and fluidity; notions of contagion, purity, wellness, disease and how such constructs may be used to ostracize unwanted members of various social groups. What do these representations of our bodies, belongings and psyches, seen through the lens of disgust, really mean to us, that we should impose such powerful and dangerous abstractions upon them? What roles can disgust play in re-shaping other less negative social interactions and in constructing social values that are in turn supportive of those interactions?
The often volatile emotions expressed through the works in this project make it easy to assume that the only story they tell is one of adversarial engagement and oppression. However, is it possible that through these many evocations of violated personal and collective borders, a peculiar sense of solidarity is being revealed? For when an out-group, seen from any side, becomes so close as to be indiscernible from ourselves isn't that when it becomes most threatening?
-- Todd Edward Herman 2021