Fire in the Belly

Dell Marie Hamilton, Joanna Tam and Georden West

Allison Maria Rodriguez, Curator

September 28–October 2, 2022

Reception Saturday, October 1, 5–7PM
Performance by Joanna Tam performance Saturday, October 1 at 6PM (Masking is required) FREE TICKETS

Fire in the Belly, a pop-up multimedia exhibition curated by Allison Maria Rodriguez, features three beautiful and provocative works exploring the politicization of the body by artists Dell Marie Hamilton, Joanna Tam, and Georden West. The exhibition will include a live performance by Tam on Saturday, October 1 at 6 PM. Masking is required.

Hamilton’s video performance work explores where art, grief, and subjectivity intersect. She uses both the absence and presence of her body to interrogate the historical conditions of representation, memory, gender, pop culture, and citizenship. Tam’s multi-media installation and performance examines the meaning of hypervisibility and invisibility in relation to safety. Through the lens of an Asian immigrant and a diasporic Hongkonger, she explores the nuances around visibility and vulnerability for people at the margins. Through film, West highlights the little-known history of Trinidad, Colorado, as the "sex-change capital of the world."  West draws attention to the erasure and archival silence that exists around the traiblazing queer histories set against the backdrop of the American West, and generates a larger conversation around the instability of the catgeory called gender and the maleability of the body. These works all possess a sense of urgency and potent immediacy that is both intensely visceral and utterly spiritual.

PRESS RELEASE

Dell Marie Hamilton, This is All We Have, performance | Georden West, Introducing Georden West, film still | Joanna Tam, Dear Mr. President, performance

Performance by Joanna Tam

Saturday October 1, 6PM RSVP
ALL PERFORMANCES ARE FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Dell Marie Hamilton has performed extensively throughout the New England area and is a recipient of the ICA/Boston’s 2021 Foster Prize. Her work has appeared in Hyperallergic, Art in America and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art as well as in the anthology AntiBlackness, edited by Moon-Kie Jung and João H. Costa Vargas which was published by Duke University Press in 2021. She is a recipient of the U.S. Latinx Art Forum’s 2021 inaugural cohort of the Charla Fund, a Ford Foundation-sponsored initiative that provides grants to Latinx artists. She also works on a variety of research and curatorial projects at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Joanna Tam is a Hong Kong-born, Boston-based interdisciplinary artist. Using video, photography, performance, installation, and community engagement, her work examines the issues of migration, construction of national identity, the notion of home, and one's connection to a place. Tam's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her projects were awarded Best Art Film at the Aesthetica Short Film Festival in York, UK, and the People’s Choice Award and Third Prize at the Prix de la Photographie, Paris. She was also the recipient of the 2020 SMFA Traveling Fellowship. Tam has been artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (NY), Boston Children’s Museum, and Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Boston Art Review, Artscope, and Emergency INDEX. She co-founded and co-operated the exhibition and studio space Howard Art Project from 2011 to 2015. She holds an MFA degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.

Georden West (pronouns: they, them)is a multimedia artist of limit-experiences and speculative openings. They are committed to curiosity. Their work places queer praxis and duration in dialogue, ideating around the liminal existences insinuated by archival silence. West's debut feature film, Playland, is a recipient of the 2021 LEF Moving Image Fund and 2022 Frameline Completion Fund. It is executive produced by Nick Knight OBE and produced by Artless Media and Starlight Entertainment as a member of Starlight Entertainment's Stars Collective. West was a 2021-22 Fine Arts Work Center Visual Arts Fellow. They are a 2021 Academy Gold Women's Fellowship Finalist and won gold at the 46th Annual Student Academy Awards.

ABOUT THE CURATOR