Event Calendar
A Pole Dance by Evan Vafai & A Lecture on Victorian Pain by Rachel Ablow
The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, Victorian Pain offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain.
November 23 is artist Rachel Fein-Smolinski's birthday, so we're throwing her a party with all of her favorite things. Come to BICA for a lecture on pain in Victorian literature by Rachel Ablow at 5:30, a pole dance performance by Evan Vafai around 6:30 accompanied by a new projection work by Fein-Smolinski.
Rachel Ablow is a Professor of English and Humanities Director at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of Victorian Pain (Princeton University Press, 2017) and editor of a special issue of the journal, Representations, on "The Social Life of Pain" (2019). Her work addresses the experiences and perspectives of sufferers, caregivers, and medical professionals.
Evan Vafai is an experienced pole performer and instructor, stage actor, visual artist, musician, and student of classical ballet.
Rachel Fein-Smolinski is an artist and educator. Her work is on view at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art.
Artist Talk: Rachel Fein-Smolinski
Rachel Fein-Smolinski will give a talk about her exhibition, This Woman Has ISSSUES!, and her artistic practice.
This program is supported by:
Sunday Soup & Stand-Up Salon
Spend your Sunday taking in soup, songs, and stand-up comedy.
Curated & Hosted by Kyla Kegler in collaboration with BICA.
Doors/Soup/Bread/Bar opens at 5
Ana will sing some songs around 6
Lindsey will do a new thing around 6:30
Jessy will tell some jokes around 7
Everyone will say goodbye promptly at 9
**Donations for the Artists will be collected after the performances**
Little cake (Ana Vafai) creates songs, hype for artists and builds community through music, performance, and friendships in Buffalo, NY. She will be singing some songs accompanied by her piano.
Lindsey Griffith is a performer, playwright, and artist. Her practice ranges from large DIY productions and interactive art to solo performance, mixing elements of theatre and contemporary performance with sculptural props and costumes to tell stories that are absurd, funny, complex, and strange. She recently toured her first full-length solo performance, Horse People, across the United States. She JUST moved to Buffalo and wants to hang out with you.
Jessy Layne Tuddenham is a Berlin-based dancer and performer. She has spent the last two decades touring Europe and beyond, engaged in performance and artworks that span contexts from major museum installations (e.g., Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Palais de Tokyo, Paris) to extempore bar sets.
In 2019, Jessy undertook a self-guided research project on stand-up comedy in Los Angeles. In her Stand-up Performance Stylings, she reports on her findings.
Stand-up stylings form a genre-bending solo series. The content of each edition functions as modular units of information that can mix and match between editions, culminating sometimes in one fine magnum opus titled Speak, Woman (The title tropes Nabokov’s Speak, Memory). All editions are built on the shoulders of the experimental dance performance scene in Berlin.
Where:
25 E. Huron St. 2 Floor
Buffalo NY, 14203
Rachel Fein-Smolinski Opening Reception
Join us for the opening of Rachel Fein-Smolinski’s exhibition, This Woman Has Issues!
Rachel Fein-Smolinski: This Woman Has ISSUES! is the third and final part of a series of exhibitions at BICA dedicated to remaking institutions into utilities that serve the public. An autopic look at the intergenerational intersections of family, healthcare, and arts communities, This Woman Has ISSUES! will take the form of an exhibition, publicly accessible archive, and a series of intimate discussions.
Fein-Smolinski’s work injects science-fictional visual strategies into the authoritative aesthetics of biology and medicine to address issues of courage, pain, neuroses, and the power dynamics embedded in the Western healthcare system. Using photography, video, and installation This Woman Has ISSUES! incorporates imagery constructed from the familial, studio, and medical archive of the late Buffalo figurative painter–and the artist’s grandmother–Jackie Felix, alongside publicly accessible archival material from medical institutions across Western New York.
Of her grandmother Fein-Smolinski says, “Jackie (Gom, what I called her) avidly consumed, deconstructed and reconstructed narratives formulated across cinema, literature, television, news, etc. She was both physically and mentally ill for the duration of her prolific career as an artist. [...] The role of the art world for Jackie, while not curative, was healing. Anyone who knew her, knew that she had no reverence for a God, but she worshipped at the altars of aesthetics and meaning.”
The title of the exhibition is taken from a message on a postcard sent by a friend to Felix from one of multimedia artist Ida Applebroog’s shows and reflects the serpentine intertwinings of art, gender, and trauma. Fein-Smolinski’s work, juxtaposed with her grandmother’s studio notes, medical records, books, newspaper clippings, emails, tools, and toys turn biomedical, personal, and postmodern art history into a fantasy laboratory where these parallel histories co-mingle.
Alongside the exhibition Fein-Smolinski will present a publicly accessible archive of Felix’s studio materials
Rachel Fein-Smolinski is an artist and educator who was raised in Buffalo, NY and holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from the San Francisco Art Institute and an M.F.A. in Art Photography from Syracuse University. Fein-Smolinski has exhibited internationally and is the recipient of numerous awards, residencies, and publications, including, most recently, the 2019 Visual Studies Workshop residency, Duke University's Archive of Documentary Arts and History of Medicine's Research grant, the 2018 Wynn Newhouse Award for Artists of Excellence with Disabilities, and the Silver Eye Center for Photography’s Fellowship 19 International Award Honorable Mention. Her most recent video, Referred Pain, was shown in the Video in America exhibition at The Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY and at SPACES in Cleveland, OH. Fein-Smolinski is currently a Photography Lecturer in The School of Art + Design at The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
This program is supported by:
BICA Microgrant Application Due
Small things are in.
Microbrewing, microdosing, microcomputing — so we’re giving out microgrants. Artists and curators are frequently asked to donate their time, labor, and money to make exhibitions or performances happen. We hope this grant will help offset some of that.
What it is:
A $300 good-faith grant for artists and curators who are realizing a project in the greater Buffalo area. This is no-strings-attached money that an artist or curator can use in whatever way they feel it’s needed.
What we fund:
Exhibitions, performances, or other projects that contribute to the visual arts in Buffalo.
Your project must:
Include at least one public event (an opening, a performance, etc)
Take place within three months (in the past or forthcoming) from the application date. IE: You could apply with a project that took place up to three months ago or a project that will take place in up to three months.
How to Apply:
You can apply online! Applications are due midnight on January 1, April 1, July 1, and October 1.
Cornelia Launch Party
This party will celebrate the publication of a Cornelia, a new visual arts review for Western New York and Southern Ontario. Come grab the first issue!
This program is supported by:
Artist Talk: Lindsay Preston Zappas
Lindsay Preston Zappas will give an artist talk about her practice and her magazine.
This program is supported by:
Opening Reception: Margaret Schrecongost
Join us for a chill Sunday afternoon reception at our new apartment gallery in South Buffalo.
About the show:
In Margaret Schrecongost’s My Body My Corpse the passive female nude of classical tableau painting is transformed into hyperactive subject, author, and secret agent from a cyber-dimension right next door. Using herself as her primary model, Schrecongost’s work is informed by art history, collage, sci-fi, and feminism, looking simultaneously forward into the future and back into the past, probing the myths and images that haunt our present.
Margaret Schrecongost is an artist born and raised in Buffalo NY. In 2016 she earned a BFA at Alfred University in Drawing/Painting. For her senior show Margaret showcased large scale narrative paintings, a subject matter she continues to investigate in the present day. Since graduation Margaret attended residencies at The Vermont Studio Center, as well as at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris France, and a month at the Herekeke Foundation in New Mexico. Margaret currently lives and works in Buffalo NY.
BICA South is a new apartment gallery located on historic McKinley Parkway in South Buffalo. Part of BICA’s visual arts ecosystem development, it will focus on local artists in intermittent engagements. It is our attempt to encourage more artists and art lovers in Buffalo to create alternative venues to show the work of their friends, peers, and colleagues.
Writing Workshop with Lindsay Preston Zappas
Alongside the exhibition Lindsay Preston Zappas: I Forgot My Shoes, Zappas and BICA are hosting a writing workshop on June 15 & 16 which will culminate with the publishing and launch party for a summer art review print publication for Buffalo in August. The workshop will consist of visits to exhibitions on view in Buffalo, discussions on how to structure art writing and criticism, and one-on-one feedback and editing from Zappas. Together, the group will work on the form and details of the publication, to be launched in August. The workshop is designed to include both first time writers and seasoned professionals, artists and non-artists alike. Space is limited in the workshop, if you are interested in participating please email emily@thebica.org to reserve a spot.
Workshop: Saturday, June 15, 10AM - 5PM with lunch provided
One-on-One's: Sunday, June 16th
Lindsay Preston Zappas is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla), a print publication, online art journal, and podcast which launched in 2015. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview, Flash Art, SFAQ, Artsy, LACanvas, and Art21. Zappas is the host of The Carla Podcast, and has contributed to KCRW as an arts commentator. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Ochi Projects (Los Angeles), City Limits (Oakland), and a two-person show at Vacancy (Los Angeles).
This program is supported by:
Opening Reception: Lindsay Preston Zappas
Lindsay Preston Zappas: I Forgot My Shoes is the second in a series of exhibitions at BICA dedicated to remaking institutions into utilities that serve the public. Investigating the role of the press in making community, I Forgot My Shoes will take the form of an exhibition, writing workshop, and zine launch.
Zappas’ work as an artist threads between media (sculpture, weaving, photography, and performance), genres (art, craft, and design), and from representation to reality, as rainbow-painted wood, furniture, paper collage, and performers spill from pictorial space into the exhibition space. Whether working with textiles, Photoshop, or paint, the human figure acts as a focal point throughout Zappas’ work, assuming classic art historical manifestations in her photographs but a vulnerable presence in the tapestries’ performative interventions. The work maintains a strong insistence on the artist’s hand and visual language, and alongside a critical edge embraces the joy of making.
Zappas says of the exhibition’s title, “Growing up, my brother often insisted on putting his shoes on while en route to school, until one day, curbside in front of the school, he realized he left his shoes at home—childish prank turned into adolescent trauma. This narrative was the starting place for the title, though I Forgot My Shoes also points outward towards the ways in which we costume, clothe, and position ourselves within a changing world, and the vulnerability that occurs when our systems break down.”
Alongside the exhibition Zappas and BICA are hosting a writing workshop on June 15 & 16 which will culminate with the launch of an art review publication for Buffalo. Based on her experience as the founder and editor-in-chief of the LA based magazine, Carla, Zappas will lead workshop participants through exhibitions on view in Buffalo, discussions on how to structure art writing and criticism, and one-on-one feedback and editorial mentoring. Together, the group will determine the form of the publication, to be launched in August. The workshop is designed to include both first time writers and seasoned professionals, artists and non-artists alike. If you are interested in participating in the workshop please email emily@thebica.org to reserve a spot.
Lindsay Preston Zappas is an L.A.-based artist, writer, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla), a print publication, online art journal, and podcast which launched in 2015. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013. Her writing has appeared in ArtReview, Flash Art, SFAQ, Artsy, LACanvas, and Art21. Zappas is the host of The Carla Podcast, and has contributed to KCRW as an arts commentator. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Ochi Projects (Los Angeles), City Limits (Oakland), and a two-person show at Vacancy (Los Angeles).
This program is supported by:
Bonanza Retrospective Runway Show
This runway show is a retrospective of the BNNZA fashion line, featuring pieces from their four collections to-date.
Bonanza Talk
In advance of their runway show, Bonanza will give an artist talk about their collaborative practice.
Art Assembly
Please join us for our next meet-and-greet--a free event open to artists, art workers, and creatives who work in any medium/outlet/form. Patrons and/or supporters of the Arts are also welcome.
Come meet others who are active in the Buffalo Arts & Cultural Community, and expand your network. Attendees are encouraged to bring marketing collateral about their work to share with others.
The mission of Art Assembly is simple and earnest: to build more community, connection and support among artists, creatives, arts workers and those who support the arts in WNY.
Screening Night: Bonanza & Friends
Bonanza curates an evening of video art that will feature their film The Drought along with films by other artists around the country and some from Buffalo as well.
Opening Reception: Bonanza
Charmed: A Bonanza Retrospective is the first in a series of exhibitions at BICA dedicated to remaking institutions into utilities that serve the public. This exhibition investigates the role of the museum in a community through a playful staging of a retrospective of work by the San Francisco-based artist collective Bonanza. Lindsay Tully, Lana Williams, and Conrad Guevara will exhibit their brief but complex six-year collaborative art practice including sculpture and painting, multiple fashion lines, short films, stand-up comedy, and immersive installations. Alongside the exhibition, Bonanza will stage a runway fashion show in the garage in a celebration of ecstatic resistance and acceptance.
About Bonanza:
Bonanza is the collective practice of Conrad Guevara, Lindsay Tully, and Lana Williams. Their work draws upon the artists' respective experiences as a filmmaker, sculptor, and painter and centers around issues of identity and questioning the value of individual authorship. Bonanza's diverse projects have included installation, film, and fashion. The artists regularly employ abstraction, performance, and humor and often use their projects as a platform for others. The work develops from a shared way of thinking and making that is truly collaborative.
This program is supported by:
