Author | Annie Malamet
Photography by Brittany Carmichael
Featured Image: From left to right: Diego Montoya, Caitlin Rose Sweet, and Bizzy posing with their installation
27th Annual Mix NYC Festival co-venue/site designer Diego Montoya told me that creating a space with feminine energy was the most important factor to him in designing the Mix Hive, the main festival space, which housed 14 installations this year.
Site designers Diego and Bizzy conceived the idea the “Hive.” The concept: a honeycomb-like Mother Queen Bee space that would serve to showcase various mixed media art pieces, curated by installation coordinators Caitlin Rose Sweet and André Azevedo. Mix is a famously sultry, dark, often chaotic atmosphere. As a result, the installations featured in the space have, historically, been ignored in typical festival coverage. Both Diego and Caitlin stressed the importance to me of the Hive space as highlighting, not overshadowing, the art; they wanted to create a beautiful, welcoming atmosphere where the installations could flourish on their own. For anyone who went to Mix this year, it is clear that only pure love and acceptance went into the design of this magical space.
Entering the Hive, I was immediately confronted by Daniel Johnson & Sparrow Miradelrio’s piece, Everyone She’s Ever Been With. In a darkened private corner, a white bed sits while various voice recordings play. The Mix catalogue describes the installation as “[combining] loops of live video footage with low-fi voice recordings of queer theory, erotica and memoirs to explore the tensions between public and private, and between bodies themselves.” This is an interactive piece: you sit or lay on the bed, you are recorded, and after you leave, an image of you is projected back onto the bed. It was fun to see people excited about this work, lounging about on the bed in sexy tableaus, or simply laying solo and listening to the recordings. This installation was engaging and thoughtful, and it would be interesting to see how it functions outside the Mix context.
piece, Everyone She’s Ever Been With
Diego and Caitlin expressed that an effort this year was made to include more international artists. An installation by a group of Australian artists, Cheap Thrills/Sweet Dreams shows the fruits of this effort. A 9-foot lantern in the shape of a trailer caravan houses various video pieces, collated by Anna Helme. Included in the selection is Helme’s short film, MyMy Radix “an experimental hybrid of documentary, fiction and performance art.” Other videos include surreal shorts by Nina Buchanan, Justin Shoulder & Behnji Ra. But my favorite was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles porn, Cowabunga My A$$, by Jackson Stacy.
Szu Burgess’ Winged Invasion was by far my favorite installation. It is such a quiet, simple piece; I would have easily missed it if Caitlin hadn’t pointed it out to me. Tiny images are projected onto the floor. To view them, you must find them in the palm of your hand so that your body becomes the screening mechanism. The videos that play are from various B-Movies featuring wasp/bee women, a trope that is often a metaphor for the culture’s fear of female sexuality: “here, there are no boundaries between horrific fantasy and lived realities; to partake in the fantasy you must also submit your own body to the poisonous perversion.”
Caitlin described Joe Merrell’s hallucinatory video Suspension of Disbelief as a “satanic cartoon.” An homage to Kenneth Anger and Aleister Crowley, this short film uses 3D technology, pulsating music, colorful surreal images, and spiritual text to create an all encompassing atmosphere. Watching this video was it’s own trip. I’m not even sure what to make of it yet, but I know that it is haunting me.
Devyn Manibo & Riko Fluchel’s installation For the Islands I’ve Lost was described by Caitlin as Mix’s most “tender” piece. A shrine made of diaphanous cloth, LED lights, a bed of rice, citrus, and garlic, houses an intimate three-channel projection. This is an immersive, sensory driven experience. The small projections become holy images, each worthy of special consideration.
There was a plethora of visual stimuli at the Mix Hive this year, but the last installation I’d like to highlight is Lionel Soukaz’s www.webcam, which was featured as part of a larger installation, 4Gy Network. This selection of videos was only viewable by putting your eye up to a peephole and watching them on computers and tablets. In Soukaz’s piece, we see various men on their webcams who “undress and communicate through body language, joining each other in the non-physical space of shared experiences.” www.webcam is a chaotic meditation on the nature of privacy and human connections.
