(From exhibition text)

In Rude Screen, the artist duo Crasis uses sculpture, video, and installation to consider themes of longing, seduction, evasion, and capture. Reinterpreting a visual language derived from medieval liturgical forms and science fiction, Crasis creates sculptures which function as hybrid screens. These forms are made by integrating a range of organic and industrial materials including aquaresin, algae, silk, and steel. Perverse and tender, aggressive and abject, alien and earthly, the figures triangulate between the viewer and the contemporary experience of separation from nature–both ecological nature and the nature inside ourselves.

The title Rude Screen references the architectural history of the Rood Screen, a partition that traditionally separated the nave from the chancel in medieval churches. These ornate dividers marked the threshold between the churchgoers and the sacred objects enclosed within; a liminal space inviting contemplation while both revealing and concealing what lay beyond. Crasis reinterprets this form as a conceptual framework for reflecting broadly on screens as a rapidly proliferating category of technologies which increasingly mediate reality.

Both science fiction and Christian theology have at their core stories of transcendence from the world as we experience it in daily life. These stories of escape can open portals for reuniting with nature, or reflect a desire to abandon it. In a world jolting towards an uncertain future, the exhibition provides the screen but refuses the remedy.  Rude Screen offers a threshold on which to pause, partially, painfully, between flooding and floating away.

IMMORTALITY THESIS considers the Gulf Coast visionary Forrest Bess’s radical theory that the unification of male and female within one’s body could produce immortality. Blending elements of academic lecture and drag, Crasis makes the case for the ongoing relevance of this marginalized dimension of Bess’ work and posits his thesis as a model for the disruption of binary systems.

For this scene, filmed Oct. 2023, CRASIS (Anne Lukins and Andy P. Davis) was commissioned to design and carry out a ritual to be included in the film: ‘IT IS A GOOD PROJECT AND SHOULD BE BUILT. The film centers on “The Ike Dike”: a proposed piece of climate mitigation infrastructure, designed to protect the Houston area, as well as  local fossil-fuel refinery and transport infrastructure, from the effects of sea-level rise and hurricane surge. 

Three performers perch on metal tripods, analogous to those used by Earth First! and other environmental justice groups during acts of nonviolent resistance. Using high beam flashlights, they illuminate a three-bodied entity as she emerges from the ocean. Three actors in business attire stand at the base of each tripod, observing. In the distance, container ships come and go from the Bay of Galveston. 

(De)monstro is a series of participatory mythopoetic rituals created in and around the city of Porto, Portugal, and culminating in an event co-organized with A Leste Studio.

The ritual is a digestive process and a catharsis of curative destruction. Using sacred clowning, special dress and custom implements, (De)Monstro honors transgression in service of life.

Created together with Andy P. Davis, collaborating under the name TONGUE: the instrument of expression and the animal itself.

Photos by @ojoaogarcia, @maximedisy, @marine.del.c.r.o.i.x

Egg of Heaven is an emergent story about the annunciation of a new world narrated and live direction by Mudwig the Love Goblin. Clumsy angels made from plants open a portal to heaven, and a song of love and longing brings a cycle into fruition.

Created together with Andy P. Davis, collaborating under the name TONGUE: the instrument of expression and the animal itself.

Presented as part of World World, an evening of performances curated by TONGUE at Vox Populi, Oct. 8, 2022.

Project support provided by the Illuminate the Arts Grant, administrated by the Philadelphia Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy.

Photos by @haleycmcdevitt + @worldsstrongestbaby

An Investigative Intervention in the Psychosocial Behaviors of two White Female Test Subjects.

Made in collaboration with Suso Phizer.

2018-2019

The “Strategic Communications Group” is a fictional organization designed to study the relationship between Temple University and residents of the surrounding neighborhood through role-playing conversations.

Strategic Communications group is organized in collaboration with Suso Phizer, Maya Bush, Lauren Fueyo, Kris Rumman, Anna Sweeney, and four anonymous artists.

A documentary about the group was made in collaboration with Suso Phizer

Project support provided by the Velocity Fund, administered by Temple Contemporary with generous funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

​Score: The dancer selects a section of road which passes through a broad variety of real estate, both publicly and privately owned. They don an apparatus which is both a marking device and ritual armor. The apparatus is 10 feet tall, and made from bamboo and steel with surveyor's chalk fixed to the apex.