FEATURING!!!!!!
Dylan Jones
Dylan Jones is a bag of student studying at PNCA. His most recent short (premiering at Gridlords) will be about 2 people almost being sacked by a mysterious 1-armed man with a briefcase. Gridlords followers should recall Jones’s 1st work, Worst Existence, during the Gridlords showcase in the NW Animation Festival. Worst Existence introduced Jones’s visual language: a “challenging piece where familiarity is alien and comforts give birth to discomforts in a beautiful style that feels loosely connected to the most psychedelic moments in Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure, or early Czech animation,” according to Sean Christensen (Gridlords’ founding lord).Manny Reyes
Manny Reyes, in the form of his Manny Layers project, will be performing “So Manny Layers.”
“So Manny Layers” is a new video and performance piece by Portland sound and live artist Manny Reyes. Challenging identity, gender norms and the tension between the masculine and feminine – Manny’s future theater combines dance, music, video and body performance in a spectacular display of camp, earnestness and new layers of self.
Moishe Keymolen
Cartoonist Moishe K. lives in Portland, OR. Upon graduating the comics certificate program at the IPRC, Moishe has published the anthology Bad Boy Image with comrades Fiona Avocado and Asher Craw, as well as his first mini comic Mindwich, and is now releasing second mini comic INHABIT.
Keymolen will be giving a multimedia presentation of his new work INHABIT. Within INHABIT main character Kraut is an outcast amongst giants. While his depraved brethren prey upon the weak, Kraut finds harmony in other species. For a complete disregard and lack of interest in clan tradition the elders banish the good-natured giant. Left in solitude, Kraut is in a search to fill the ever-present void his isolation has brought. Unbeknownst to him, the only home he has known is confronted with an alien invasion.
Alex Chiu
Alex Chiu will be presenting a multimedia performance of sound and vision realized solely by his own eyeballs, transmitted straight to his hands and projected to Gridlords’ screens for our viewing pleasure.
Alex Chiu explains: “The world that I create is a world full of bubbly-eyed creatures that dance and play. There isn’t supposed to be a deep meaning or purpose behind it. It is what it is. My characters float around wielding daggers, they talk about poop, and they vomit a lot. I don’t want them to worry about life. I want them to play and dance and be happy”.
Sean Christensen (Gridlords’ founding lord) explains: Alex Chiu will be enacting a mind play in a universe where you meet the birthplace of your formative dreams and are met with the inevitable gravity of change, but in a twist revitalizing its impact and reminding us all to love life and never forget your roots and to have a rad time! HAVE A RAD TIME!
Alex Chiu is one half of the popular Marsuplala perfomance group, and co-publisher of Eyeball Burp magazine.
Manny Reyes
Manny Reyes, in the form of his Manny Layers project, will be performing “So Manny Layers.””So Manny Layers” is a new video and performance piece by Portland sound and live artist Manny Reyes. Challenging identity, gender norms and the tension between the masculine and feminine – Manny’s future theater combines dance, music, video and body performance in a spectacular display of camp, earnestness and new layers of self.
Reyes is originally from Las Vegas, NV, a 1st-generation Mexican-American who grew up next to a Drive In- watching 100’s of movies silently from the top of his swing set. After graduating from Vegas High, Reyes attended Hunter College in NYC to study art and film and he is currently pursuing an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice and Studio Practice at Portland State University. Reyes has performed at Disjecta, PNCA, Portland Art Museum, Risk/Reward, and a multitude of bars, art spaces and basement parties.
Gridlords
Gridlords is a narrative arts and performance-based monthly live experience. Its roots are in Portland’s underground and art comics community, starting in April 2012 at the Waypost. With a strong love of interdisciplinary performance and storytelling, and a desire to marry sound and vision in new ways, Gridlords inventor Sean Christensen felt a void of a live experience in the world he knew was possible. He felt its echoes from fragments in memories and saw its potential in his future. Gridlords wishes to be the lectures of Lynda Barry as an explosive inspirational devotional performance piece or the performance pieces of Laurie Anderson as a universe! The world has become used to facing a device that is feeding you animated images and audio messages while your friend is virtually talking to you and your other friend is talking to you in person while facing their own device with a whole other set of stimuli. Gridlords is the stimulus presented all at once for a unified audience with an attention span. Gridlords wants you, the audience, to feel a part of something.