X-TRA Forums #2
Patrick Staff presents CLEAN NEEDLES NOW & NOW
a performance-screening
Wednesday July 18, 2018
7:30 – 10:00 pm
at Navel
1611 S Hope St., Downtown Los Angeles, 90015
CLEAN NEEDLES NOW & NOW is an evening length performance-screening event by artist Patrick Staff, presented as part of the X-TRA Forums series. Continuing the format of Staff’s previous performance-screenings, such as Uniform Smoke presented at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2015, and Missives at the Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver, 2016, the evening will present a series of artist moving image works, music and text within an installation.
This is the second of the X-TRA Forums, a series of programs using the 20-year archive of contemporary art quarterly X-TRA as a springboard. The event takes its inspiration from Dont Rhine’s essay Below The Skin: Aids Activism and the Art of Clean Needles Now included in X-TRA Magazine issue Volume 15 Number 3, published in 2013. The article establishes a history of artist’s involvement in Clean Needles Now (CNN), a needle exchange initiative that was formed as an official committee within ACT UP Los Angeles, drawing particular attention to the role of artists and their strategies in its early years of operation.
Rather than re-tell or reproduce the history traced in the article, Clean Needles Now & Now seeks to explore the permeability of boundaries; transmission and carriers; cleanliness and immunity; the sharing, use, and re-use of images and practices; occupied territories of the body; the toxic and the intoxicated. For many of the organizers of CNN, in service of harm reduction the aim of the project was to “bring the needle out of the shadows.” Though this speaks to their aims in direction action, a poem quoted at the top of the article speaks to another side of the situation:
When the cap is removed
its silver needle scintillates
promises,
inconstancy,
ambiguity.
– Samuel R. Friedman, “The Needle”
PARKING for Navel:
- NAVEL is located at 1611 S Hope Street. The direct entrance to our space is located through a large black gate on Venice Blvd. Follow the posted sign to the gate and enter through the first door on the left just past the gate. See the map below.
- If you’re arriving via Lyft/Uber (which we highly recommend) then use 418 Venice Blvd. as your destination and this will drop you off right in front of the black gate.
- If you’re arriving via Metro, the closest station is the Pico Station on the Blue & Expo Lines.
- Self Parking is available in the parking lot directly underneath the I-10 freeway, cash only, payable to the United Valet Parking staff onsite or the payment box near the entrance. We recommend street parking (or Lyft/Uber/Public Transport!).
- Do NOT park in the lot directly connected to our building, you will be towed.
- For wheelchair access, call (213) 340-4213 to access the front entrance.
Patrick Staff (b. 1987, UK; lives and works in Los Angeles and London, UK) studied at Goldsmiths College, London (2009), and was part of the Associate Artist Programme at LUX, London (2011). Their work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2017); New Museum, New York (2017); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London (2015); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); Tate Liverpool, UK (2014); Tate Modern, London (2012); and Whitstable Biennale, UK (2012). They have received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Artists (2015). Staff has had residencies at FD13 Residency for the Arts (2018), LUX (2014), The Showroom (2014), Fogo Island Arts (2012), and Banff Centre (2010).
For more information on the first X-TRA Forum, presented by Malik Gaines, visit this link.
The X-TRA Forums made possible with support from Pasadena Art Alliance, Isambard Kingdom Brunel Society of North America, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Additional support for this screening from Navel and Video Data Bank at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
