Working as one-person production houses for music, video, and performance, the artists on tonight’s double-bill combine consumer-grade digital technologies with ample doses of absurdist humor and critical insight to create textured universes that amplify the inner monologues of the avatars they portray.  In the performance-based videos that he writes, directs, edits, and stars in, Kalup Linzy leverages the styles and narratives of American soap operas and Spanish-language telenovelas, Hollywood tearjerkers, and Nigerian video melodramas to satirically deconstruct themes of sexuality and gender, race, class, and pop culture. Meanwhile, Dynasty Handbag is the one-woman music/comedy/video/performance/meltdown/portable electro-ballad vehicle of Jibz Cameron. Cameron performs with a backing track containing original dialogue, music, and video of her deranged yet sensitive exploration of personal psychic waste.

Tonight, accompanied by video projection, Linzy performs songs from his new album SweetBerry Sonnet as well as new and unreleased material.  Songs will include: "Hot Mess," "Ignorant Oil," "Dirty Trade," and "Asshole."  He is also giving away fifteen hard copies of the CD. Dynasty Handbag delivers a sampler platter of psychic waste performance art, which includes a sneak peak at her hilarious and gloomy evening-length work in progress Oh Death, for which she recently was awarded finishing funds by the Franklin Furnace Award for Performing Arts.

Kalup Linzy’s work has recently been included in the 2008 group exhibitions Prospect 1, New Orleans; “30 Americans” at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami; and “Laughing in a Foreign Language” at the Hayward Gallery, London.  Linzy also creates works on paper, such as Katonya, a character featured in his video series Conversations wit de Churen (2002–present).

In 2006 Jibz Cameron released her first solo record as Dynasty Handbag entitled Foo Foo Yik Yik. She has toured extensively in the United States and Europe. Her performance and video work has been seen in such institutions as The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, Joe's Pub, C'est Duckie U.K., SCOPE Art Miami, BAM, CAM Houston, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SXSW Film Festival, and The New Underground Film Festival. She is the recipient of the Fresh Tracks Artist In Residency award at Dance Theater Workshop and a 2008 recipient of The Franklin Furnace Fund grant for the performing arts.  

Credit: Courtesy of the artist and Taxter and Spengemann.