Jungle Boogie 2: Portrait of the Artist as a Colossal Wreck

Selected Projects (2008-2021)

By Brandon Alvendia

Jungle Boogie 2: Portrait of the Artist as a Colossal Wreck is a restaging of extant artworks, documents, and reclaimed materials derived from 13 years of artistic output of the artist, curator, and educator Brandon Alvendia, living and working out of Chicago. The artist portrays himself in this solo survey as a corpse stranded on a deserted archipelago amidst the wreckage of a shipwreck scattering his smuggled wares. 

The work will be placed throughout the space in a series of desert island vignettes, designed to highlight the different methodology at play, spanning installation, curating, research, publishing, and foremost, collaboration. All of which is delivered with the signature comedic timing of the recently self-proclaimed (on Twitter), “Friendly First Generation Filipino Failson, America's Next Top Model Minority, and Sane Middle Class Asian American Anchor Baby.” 

Detourning and decolonizing what would be a momentous occasion of an objective mid-career retrospective, the artist instead portrays himself working on an act of salvage and survival during a proverbial mid-career crisis. The works appear as compromised, damaged, fragmented, shabby, weathered, obscured, indistinct, and otherwise incomplete hazy documents adrift in the psychedelic experience of being lost in the vast sea of our contemporary moment. However, signs of reclamation, repurpose, reinvigoration, and reenchantment pervade the scenes, quickly erected ad-hoc altars and other useful, albeit rickety, structures prop up the remains, evidence of a desire for connection despite the condition of extreme isolation, a faint beacon at the top of the small barren hill still stands. 

The artist, like scores of others, has managed to tread water on the precarious raft of creative-class 1099 labor struggle, the joys and difficulties of coalition building in an era of unprecedented atomization under capitalist identity regimes, the prospect of creating an alternative space of experience outside of the mirrored cave of post-modern, hyper-accelerated procession of images of social control through ceaseless consumption of self, diverting the wasteful stream of the ecological and human exploitation through material reclamation using amateur low waste, functional design tools and production strategies, the instrumentalized fetishization of self-care practices optimized to maximize efficiency disguised as spirituality, the neoliberal pleasures of Neko Atsume and Abstract Painting, and the reduction of language limited to hot-takes under 280 characters. #thirsty #sweaty #moodbored FollowLikeSubscribe  

The project will end with the ritual burning of one of the altars designed for the occasion onto which visitors are invited to add their own messages to the fire. During the run of the show, production begins on a new artist book relaunching the dormant Silver Galleon Press to catalog the work but, more importantly, to thank the community the artist is indebted to. Immediately preceding the exhibition is the new piece NFT(Not F*cking Telling) a 5-act stage play adapted for and performed in a bank.

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NFT (Not F*cking Telling)

5-act stage play adapted for a bank.

2021

The artist will be premiering NFT(Not F*cking Telling). A 5-act stage play adapted for and performed in a bank with opportunities for audience engagement. The 15-minute performance inverts the genre, aesthetic, and production value of the Hollywood buddy heist film wherein guests are invited to assist in the rapid in situ installation of the work for the purpose of documentation in the form of analog instant photography. The result of which is placed in a sealed envelope signed and dated by the participants. After an equally urgent clean-up crew, the group may either hop into their respective getaway Lyfts or steal away to burn the evidence.

Guests that wish to participate should be aware of some sporadic environmental effects in the form of strobe, noise, darkness, as well as the ongoing challenges of existing indoors during a pandemic. Loose fitting clothes and functional shoes recommended to traverse the piece quickly and safely and/or formalwear for added challenge and distinction. The work may be experienced in a passive spectator fashion with no loss of fidelity of the work. Masks required throughout, some masks will be available for those that wish to conceal their identity. This event is FREE. BYO.

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Brandon Alvendia is an artist, independent curator, and educator.

Brandon researches and regularly collaborates with artist-run initiatives around North America to develop site-specific community-driven exhibitions, events, and publications that create space for experimentation, discussion, and collaboration. He is the founder of Chicago alternative spaces artLedge (2004-2007 w/ Caleb Lyons), BEN RUSSELL (2009-2011 w/Ben Russell), The Storefront (2010-2014), and Silver Galleon Press (2008-present).

In 2020, Brandon was Saturday editor and livestream producer/host for The Quarantine Times (published by Public Media Institute), organized the Zoom happenings OFFICE PARTY 1&2 for the 6th edition of the Common Field Convening, and closed the year out with an internet performance series for public intimacies, curated by Abigail Satinsky at Tufts University Art Galleries, Boston titled The Love Bug (Fwd:LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU). He is currently an Independent Curators International Research Fellow supported by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and the Hartfield Foundation. The area of focus is on artist-run alternative spaces operating within the Mississippi River Basin region of the United States.

Brandon has taught at the School of The Art Institute, University of Illinois, and Columbia College, all in Chicago, and Maine College of Art (MECA) in Portland, ME. He is an alum of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA ‘03), the University of Illinois at Chicago (MFA ‘07), Copycat Academy (Toronto, 2014), and Independent Curators International Curatorial Intensive (New Orleans, 2015).

Before the After Party is a long-postponed group exhibition featuring five 2019 ACRE Residents: Amy Cousins, Charles Ryan Long, Christopher Sonny Martinez, Toisha Tucker and Zachary Hutchinson.

Co-curated by Nick Wylie, Sofia Moreno and Paula Volpato.

• Closing celebration: Friday, August 27th 7-10pm

  With artists, free beer, and recent Wave Farm resident, Kamikaze Jones, will be playing disco, club, and queer porn selections to dance to under the fuzzy disco ball~

• Remaining open hours: Saturday, August 28th 12-8pm and Sunday, August 29th 12-3pm.

Before the After Party is one in a sea of exhibitions opening after waking from a long slumber of indeterminate postponement. At the first public Co-Prosperity opening since we started referring to the pandemic in the past tense, we see a glimpse of time travels queerer than the sticky ticking of lockdown time.

Recorded history would have us believe that homosexuals and transgender folks are modern inventions, born of ever-shifting recent language—“Inverts,” “Comrades,” “Fairies,” or wordlessly with a flip of the wrist, a bandana in the back pocket, a sly look over the shoulder. For a window of time queer life was marked by a non-participation in normative biological time—puberty, dating, living, kids, nest, retirement. By contrast, queers often had long, studious childhoods, and grew up to enjoy what might look like a prolonged adolescence—a continued participation in countercultural parties, protests and pageantry usually seen as the realm of teens and young adults tasting what it might feel like to be free. The queer refusal to leave the party at the end of the night, to go home to a normative life and sleep it off, is where the queer possibilities begin, the transient site of the After Party.

Recalling pasts that are still present, the exhibition invites us to imagine how to revere the radical legacies that haunt us while demanding futures queerer and more beautiful than the ones on offer. Charles Ryan Long sees a near future marked by the inevitable “end of white manhood” and shows us a path to an Afro futurism paved in love and rage.  If you want to rage, love, come to a party where you’ll be invited to throw Toisha Tucker’s weighted confetti at sundown, be transfixed by Amy Cousins’ mammalian disco ball near the almost-lifesized protesters who brought Chicago our first queer dance party, check your look against images of queer revelry captured by Christopher Sonny Martinez, look at slide shows of what will be while containing your excitement in the bracelet you’re clutching, and at some point find a corner to drift off, wrapped in Zachary Hutchinson’s festooned blankets of the recent past. When you leave you won’t know what time it is.

The exhibition, already displaced in time, will be displaced in space as well. Launching in Chicago at the outset of summer, it will then have a second life as the first show at Co-Prosperity Catskill, a new space in the New York town where Washington Irving’s short story Rip Van Winkle was born. The antihero of the story is a colonial buffoon who takes a too-strong drink from giants and sleeps through the American Revolution. When he finally wakes up and goes to drink more at King George’s Pub, he finds that the name of the colonizing monarch has been erased. 

In some ways it can be nice to imagine going to sleep one day and waking up in a world changed by revolution. There’s also the rebel’s somniphobia- fear of not being awake for Marx’s millenarian moments when we have so much rage and love to help fuel them. Could the queer future be in the gay past, though? We could just do the separatist thing of our foreparents- run away to farms and say, “wake me when it’s over, when you’re having the after parties.” Who knows-  let’s dance together again, we’ll probably remember the moves.

Amy Cousins

Amy Cousins is an artist and educator from Houston, Texas living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Tyler School of Art & Architecture. Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, the Visual Arts Center at Boise State University, and the Lawrence Arts Center in Kansas. Cousins was an artist-in-residence at Illinois State University in 2018 and at ACRE Residency in 2019. She is a 2020 recipient of InLiquid’s Wind Fellowship.

Zachary Hutchingson

Zachary Hutchinson (b. 1991) is an artist living and working in Chicago IL. Hutchinson came to Chicago in 2010 to attend school at the School of the Art Institute Chicago where she earned her BFA in interdisciplinary arts in 2015. Hutchinson continued her education at the University of Illinois - Chicago earning a MFA in moving image in 2017. She has shown work globally in places like Montreal, Mexico City, San Francisco CA, NYC, Los Angeles CA, Portland OR, Austin TX, Berlin Germany, Athens Greece, Glasgow United Kingdom, Iceland, Venice, and extensively in Chicago IL. She is currently an adjunct professor at UIC and was recently listed as one of the Chicago Film 50 for the 2020.

Charles Ryan Long

charles ryan long is a Chicago born and based interdisciplinary maker and shaker. He uses varying mediums as pathways to making works that seek to pierce through our current realities making way for futures not yet imagined. His works seek to prod the viewer/ participant into dialogues that make visible both our personal and communal roles in what comes next.

 Christopher Sonny Martinez

Christopher Sonny Martinez is a filmmaker and photographer born and raised in Oak Cliff, Texas. Martinez has lived and produced work in Chicago, IL, New York, NY, and Dallas, TX. Martinez’s work breeds intimate moments from a Queer Chicano lens.

 Toisha Tucker

Tucker is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and writer. Their work explores three often-overlapping veins of critique. They use art as a mode of cultural organizing illuminating social constructions of gender, race, and identity. They posit incisive critiques of contemporary and historical events of Western society. They delve into the anthropomorphic relationship between technology and humans, contemporary dystopia and human empathy. Their practice is process and research based and manifests through text-based prints, photographs, video, performative pieces, sculptural installations, analog and virtual physical labor, crafting, repetition, and other media that aim to directly engage with the body. Tucker’s work reflects their deep desire for precision in material, firsthand experiential evidence, and fabrication that conveys these elements. Many of the pieces are ongoing and mutable. Tucker resides in the Bronx with their partner, a thriving aloe plant named Wednesday and a fiddle leaf fig named Newton.