Dis…Miss

Anne Bray

Medium: Archive, Installation, Live & Interactive Events, Transmedia, Video, and Web Portal
Issues: Collaboration, Gender Identity, Participatory Performance, and Public Space

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Project Links

Description

Dis…Miss examines how contemporary feminist artists and writers are offering new images of gender identities. Sumptuous photographs and short texts interweave to create a new picture of non-binary life online and in person. Ten artists’ postcards were distributed, each with an artist’s image and a related question that 1100+ participants have answered anonymously at 30 Los Angeles venues and in Manila, Tehran, and Graz. USC social scientist Marisa Turesky, specializing in data analysis, aggregated the answers into tantalizing, trenchant summations that became inconclusive infographics to be shared as public discourse. Former UX designer at the Getty, Catherine Bell transformed the analysis as 10 interactive infographics that show synthesized answers as animations, available at http://freewaves.org/dismiss-analysis. Images and texts by 30 artists and art groups are also included in a night of performance art called ‘Ain’t I A Womxn?’ http://freewaves.org/aint-i-a-woman-september/at L.A. State Historic Park, near Downtown Los Angeles in 2018 under a full moon and another called Love &/or Fear? http://freewaves.org/loveandorfear/ on Hollywood Boulevard in 2019. These public art events included all the art above plus zines, videos, audience interactivities and performances. Dis…Miss also includes 25 feminist PSAs by Freewaves’ five commissioned artists and collectives shown on LA Metro bus TVs to one million riders a day. An essay about each image reveals unconscious layers of each image. Eventually, it will become a book online or in print.

Bio

Anne Bray is an artist and director of Freewaves. As an artist, she works at the intersection of public space and media art. As director of the nonprofit media arts organization, Freewaves, co-founded in 1989, her work includes mounting eleven biennial festivals presenting more than 3000 artists with the partnership of 125 curators and more than 100 organizations that have been held at Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty Center, Hammer Museum, on Hollywood Blvd. and on Chinatown streets. She has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacArthur, Rockefeller, Rauschenberg, and Warhol Foundations. Freewaves’ 21st anniversary was celebrated at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2010 with an exhibition and a launch of a book, DVD and new web archive. Recently she has been showing artists videos on Metro buses and projecting poems at public events. Anne Bray is a visual instigator and translator. Her specialty is finding platforms for pressing and compelling subjects to be broached from various angles in different media. She exhibits work in formats that the public, often unaware of contemporary art, can comprehend without the work losing its integrity. In her art, like in her career, she contrasts different points of view side by side. Viewers are asked to examine themselves and questions are often the format.