7PM Sunday, April 29, 2018: Screening of A.K. Burns + A.L. Steiner's 69 minute feature Community Action Center (2010) followed by a Q+A with the artists.
Community Action Center incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by 1960's and 1970's feminist video art and porn-romance-liberation films, which both served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a hole-filler. Sex, sexuality and the complexities of gendered bodies are inherently political. This project is a small archive of an intergenerational community built on collaboration, friendship, sex and art. The work attempts to explore a consideration of feminist fashion, sexual aesthetics and an expansive view of what is defined as ‘sex’.
Burns and Steiner worked with artists and performers who created infinitely complex gender and performance roles that are both real and fantastical, set to a soundtrack of music culled from the worldwide sisterhood: Chicks on Speed, Effi Briest, Electrelane, Chateau featuring K8 Hardy, Lesbians on Ecstasy, Light Asylum, MEN, Motherland, NGUZUNGUZU, I.U.D. (Lizzi Bougatsos & Sadie Laska), Kinski and Thee Majesty (Genesis P-Orridge), and featuring original compositions by Justin Bond, Nick Hallett & Sam Greenleaf Miller, Ashland Mines & Wu Tsang, Sergei Tcherepnin and Tri-State Area with A V Linton. The video seeks to expose and reformulate paradigms that are typical of porn typologies, intentionally exploiting tropes for their comical value, critical consideration and historical homage. The artists have created a reason to reflect on the cultural realness of homo-grown lesbian sexuality, and the work aims to be a hedonistic and distinctly political adventure.
