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The Interior Beauty Salon and The Leslie-Lohman Museum present LUX / A project by Arantxa Araujo

In collaboration with Gabriel Chakarji, Vicios Ocultos and Mariana Uribe

Could fully-immersing ourselves into an audiovisual experience expand our consciousness?

On February 28, 2021 at 7 PM EST, LUX  will culminate a 28 -day journey with a half-hour virtual practice, and a participatory performance live-streamed through Zoom and YouTube from The Leslie-Lohman Museum. LUX invites us to show up and immerse ourselves in an audiovisual oasis of consciousness, and to allow visualization and meditation to expand our awareness and to dissolve any duality between subject/object. 

The Performance will be followed by conversation about our shared experiences. This will involve Arantxa Araujo, Gabriel Chakarji, Mariana Uribe, Anna Costa e Silva, and Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art is the only dedicated LGBTQ art museum in the world with a mission to exhibit and preserve LGBTQ art and foster the artists who create it.

To register for free for the performance at The Leslie-Lohman Museum click HERE

Still from video courtesy of the artist  / Arantxa Araujo related links: website / IG 

LUX was launched on February 1 as a daily invitation to show up for an experimental meditative practice across virtual time and space. LUX merges meditative practices, scientific research, experiential technologies, and aesthetics in an ongoing 28-day series hosted by The Interior Beauty Salon. The Salon, launched by Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo in 2017 in the Bronx, NY, serves as a space where that which is not necessarily seen or manifested in tangible ways, is seeded, nurtured, and given room to grow safely. This includes processes of melding art, ritual, ceremony, rites of passage, and healing. The Interior Beauty Salon was born out of the urgency to re-shift the focus from the external and the extraneous in contemporary society and instead to place attention on the very depths of who we might ultimately be. www.interiorbeautysalon.com.

The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art is the only dedicated LGBTQ art museum in the world with a mission to exhibit and preserve LGBTQ art and foster the artists who create it.

To learn  more about LUX and to access the 28 video archive click HERE

About the participants:

Arantxa Araujo is a Mexican artist with a background in neuroscience. Her work is essentially multidisciplinary, feminist, and rooted in bio-behavioral research and technology. Explorations of gender constructions, performativity and identity, and the politics of migration are seen and experienced in her installations, which often include new media, video, sound, photography, mapping, light, and performance.  Her work has been shown in the Brooklyn Museum, at the Radical Women Latin American Art Exhibit, Chashama Space to Present, Grace Exhibition Space, Glasshouse Gallery, The Queens Museum, Panoply Lab, Art in Odd Places in NYC; RAW during Miami Art Week; the Semel and Huret & Spector Gallery in Boston, and the SPACE Gallery and Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh; in Mexico, at El Monumento a la Revolución and La Explanada del MUAC, during the Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro and El Vicio; also participated in the Nuit Blanche Festival in Saskatoon, Canada.

Araujo is a Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art award recipient (2020/1019), BAC grantee (2020), an LMCC (2019) grantee and has received support through numerous residencies and fellowships including Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship (2019-2020), Creative Capital taller (2018), ITP Camp (2018, 2019) and EMERGENYC (2017). Araujo was awarded a full scholarship from Mexican Government Institution CONACYT (2012). She holds an MA in Motor Learning and Control from Teachers College, Columbia University and a BA in Theater Studies from Emerson College. 

Vicios Ocultos is a music and art collective that was born after an exploration of self-love and an exercise for overcoming an emotional crisis. It's a free-format project with a hypnotic and abstract aesthetic.

Gabriel Chakarji is a Latin Grammy Award nominee pianist and composer who merges the sounds and music of his native Venezuela with New York City jazz. Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, Chakarji grew up in a multicultural environment full of music, from Afro-Venezuelan folk, Caribbean, and Brazilian music, to jazz and gospel hymns.Chakarji has performed with his trio in the U.S. and has toured extensively in Europe. He released his first album as a soloist called "New Beginning" in May 2020, a book of his compositions written in New York heavily influenced by Afro Venezuelan Music and Contemporary Jazz. It has received many good critics, and it was added to the "Jazz Currents" playlist in Apple Music curated by Aaron Parks. He is now working on his latest project, “Venezuela in Motion”, together with many talented Venezuelan musicians now based in New York.

Anna Costa e Silva works with constructed situations between people that happen at the intersections of visual arts, performance, film and ritual. The recipient of an MFA in Visual Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York, Anna has received awards such as American Austrian Foundation Prize in Fine Arts and FOCO ArtRio Fair. She was a PIPA Prize nominee in 2018 and 2020 and a finalist for the prestigious Marcantonio Vilaça Award in 2019. Among her solo exhibitions are Asymptotes at Caixa Cultural (Rio de Janeiro), Éter at Centro Cultural São Paulo (São Paulo), and It all seems like flying at Superfície Gallery (São Paulo). She has works in public and private collections, including MAR — The Museu de Arte do Rio (Rio de Janeiro).

Nicolás Dumit Estévez Raful Espejo treads an elusive path that manifests itself through experiences where the quotidian and art often overlap. From 1998-2000 he studied with Coco Fusco and has received mentorship from Linda Mary Montano, a pioneer figure in the performance art field. Estévez Raful Espejo holds degrees in art and theology. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, he was baptized as a Bronxite, a citizen of the Bronx in 2011. www.elmuseo.org/office-hours

Later Event: March 15
Charo Oquet