Ron Athey

“Joyce” (artist talk)

In Joyce, I use real and imaged footage of schizophrenia, disassociation, self-mutliation and mother/daughter incest. The “rhythm” is set by an EEG pattern, which is paralleled with an automatic writer on video and an action painter on stage.

Biography

Ron Athey, b. December 16, 1961, began making performance art in small galleries in a collaboration called Premature Ejaculation with Rozz Williams (1981). In 1992, after years of performing in nightclubs, his first theatrical performance, Martyrs and Saints, was shown at LACE gallery in Los Angeles. That piece and the other two installments of my “torture trilogy, 4 Scenes in A Harsh Life, and Deliverance,” toured festivals and art centers in the UK, Europe and Mexico. Currently his artwork is being shown in group shows at the Tate Liverpool, Kunsthalle Vienna, and Western Project in L.A. With Vaginal Davis he co-curated the Platinum Oasis Outfest live art extravaganza at the Coral Sands Motel (2001-2) and Visions of Excess (2003) at a lap dance club in Birmingham, England. In the writing department, Athey is a features writer for the LA Weekly, and has been working on a memoir based on his Pentecostal upbringing called Gifts of the Spirit.

“Powering Up/Powering Down” is sponsored in part by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), and the UC San Diego Department of Music in connection with the departments of Visual Arts, Music, and Literature at UCSD along with the UC Riverside and Los Angeles campuses.