SHIT. FREE EVENTS THIS SUMMER AT CINDERS.
This month, Cinders Gallery presents the work of San Francisco artists Sara Thustra and Kyle Ranson in their collaborative show, “Shit. Free Art N Good Times,” their first joint appearance in New York City. These artists are known as much in the Bay Area for their commitment to activism and social work as their colorful and heartfelt art works. Ranson worked for many years as an outreach counselor to homeless youth and Thustra’s screenprinted posters and political graffiti are ever present in the streets at Bay Area protests. Thustra’s images indeed have become emblematic of punk and queer community resistance to gentrification and war in SF in the past decade.

In conjunction with their exhibition this month, Cinders is proud to host a series of free events curated by author, Erick Lyle, a longtime San Francisco friend and collaborator of Thustra and Ranson, now relocated to Brooklyn. Lyle’s book, On The Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of The City (2008, Soft Skull Press) relates the adventures and struggles of Thustra, Lyle, and many others as they plan protest and art actions together in a rapidly gentrifying city at the dawn of this wartime era. Some of the better results were a huge art show in a squatted abandoned building downtown, free illegal generator punk shows in the streets, Thustra’s Anti-Capitalist Fashion Show, and the group’s participation in the massive protests that shutdown the entire city of San Francisco when the war in Iraq started in March of 2003. At Cinders this month, in a series of free film screenings, readings, music performances, and dinners, Lyle reassembles members of that San Francisco community and the Utopian spirit of their current art here in Brooklyn.

// Thursday June 23 8pm // FILMS AND DINNER//
There will be a rare NYC screening of Sara Thustra’s most recent feature length film, The Treatment, along with two short films, “California is an Island” by Sarolta Jane Cump, and “Performance Spaces” by Heather Rene Russ. Inspired by Sara Thustra’s long time tradition of serving free food at his San Francisco protest and art events, the screening will be preceded by a free dinner for all. Vegans welcome!

ABOUT THE TREATMENT: Two years in the making, “2010 ‘s Best Art Movie”, The Treatment (60 minutes) is the third movie made by Thustra and Siobahn Alluvalot under the collective name, Lovewarz. The viewer is taken into a world of live performance art filmed across the country, a narrative of historical examples of artists fighting for access to new language. A star cast jumps through vivid scenery exhibiting gutteral attempts at using new voices to address the commonalities in our lives. Not meant for the weary, The Treatment is an experience challenging our culture’s motives, color schemes, storytelling and sense of self through others. 60mins

ABOUT CALIFORNIA IS AN ISLAND AND SAROLTA JANE CUMP:
This debut short (20 minutes) tells the never before told history of the island of California’s discovery and its controversial, queer mapping. Drawing on accounts of the conquistador Hernando Cortes’ attempt to settle Baja California, as well as 16th Century cartographies and a romance adventure novel ripe with Amazons; the nineteen minute experimental documentary ‘California is an Island’ uses lushly shot re-enactments, animations of re-appropriated map graphics, and text to investigate the fantasies, fears and fetishes of European explorers with a post-colonial, queer lens and a bawdy sense of humor to boot.
Sarolta Jane Cump uses film, video and other less fancy tools to explore the intersections between public and private histories & interrupt the dominant narrative. She is based in Oakland, Alta California and was recently inspired by collaborating with the Water Underground.

ABOUT HEATHER RENEE RUSS AND PERFORMANCE SPACES:
“Performance Spaces” (10 minutes) is a trailer of a longer work in progress, consisting of contemporary video portraits of three individuals, Pedals, Nathann and Tuck who have a certain enigmatic quality to their daily performance. While on quest to present themselves to ‘the other’ each
encounter their unicity. Through playful editing understanding is
intentionally suspended, calling attention to the viewer’s own
performances.
Photographer and video artist, Heather Renee Russ is the co-editor of Cutter Photozine and the longtime host of San Francisco’s now-defunct monthly club series, Club Feral. Recently graduated with an MFA in Photo/Video from SVA, she has lived in Brooklyn for two years.

//Thursday, June 30 8pm//READINGS AND FILM//
Cinders hosts a night of readings and film. Erick Lyle, Savannah Knoop, and Kat Case will all debut new fictional works. After an intermission, there will be a screening of Cary Cronenwett’s Bay Area classic, Maggots and Men (2009). Featuring an all-star cast that includes Thustra himself, and lovingly shot in beautiful Super 8, Maggots (54 minutes) reimagines the Kronstadt Uprising of the Russian Revolution as a transgendered Utopia.

ABOUT THE READERS:
ERICK LYLE is the editor of the long-running underground punk/criminal zine, SCAM, and the author of On The Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of The City. His work has appeared on This American Life, in The Brooklyn Rail, Raritan, and he is a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. His next book will be published by Soft Skull Press May 2012 in conjunction with an exhibition at San Francisco’s Luggage Store Gallery.
www.onthelowerfrequencies.com

SAVANNAH KNOOP is an interdisciplinary storyteller. Through writing, clothing- making, and performance, she explores the notions of perceived image and the prismatic quality of identity. Her memoir, Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT Leroy was published by 7 Stories Press in 2008. She will be reading from a new fictional work in progress, loosely titled “School of Fish”, in which a young woman named Gerald, self-injects those places “wanting” in her body with her mother’s beauty home-kit, a product called Radiance. When Gerald moves to a new city her co-dependance with the School of Fish quickly becomes difficult and Gerald struggles to negotiate a new life for herself. Knoop now lives in Brooklyn.
KAT CASE is a formerly columnist for the underground punk bible, Maximum Rock and Roll, and the editor of her own zine, 36 Snaphots. Case is now a public high school teacher in East New York.

ABOUT MAGGOTS AND MEN AND CARY CRONENWETT:
Film-watchers of the world unite! Seeing Cary Cronenwett’s Maggots and Men, you have nothing to lose but your preconceptions of gender. This utopian re-visioning of the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921, featuring film history’s first cast of over 100 transgender actors, paints an idyllic portrait of formerly pro-Soviet sailors at the Kronstadt naval garrison who rebelled against the perceived failures of the new Bolshevik state.

 A degree in Russian history and a familiarity with the work of Soviet cinema master Sergei Eisenstein will certainly deepen your understanding of this ambitious experimental film — you need neither, however, to appreciate Flo McGarrell’s stunning art direction, Jascha Ephraim’s lyrical score or the physical beauty of the trans-masculine actors. In drawing a parallel between the history of revolution and the free expression of gender, Maggots and Men evokes the poignant sense that our present world is haunted by radical potentials that have yet to be fulfilled.

 This pioneering Frameline Film and Video Completion Fund winner positions the struggle for gender equality within a larger struggle for peace and justice, bringing together trans and queer communities as well as audience members drawn to the film’s political content. Ahoy Sailor! — SUSAN STRYKER

Friday July 8th 8pm//Live music with SHELLSHAG//IVY and ERICK//
A closing show featuring live bands. Current Brooklyn heroes by way of the Bay, SHELL SHAG, bring their two-piece noisy pop blowout to the gallery. They will be joined by IVY AND ERICK, playing for the first time in NYC in three years. Ivy Jeanne and Lyle of Black Rainbow bring their lower-fi guitar and vocal punk/soul arrangements to Brooklyn in what one can only hope will reprise their performance at Sara Thustra’s legendary 2005 art show inside San Francisco’s City Hall.


ABOUT SHELLSHAG:
Shell Head (Shell) and Jennifer Shagawat (Shag) have been writing songs together for 13 years, and performing live for 6. They are the DIY stalwarts behind the Brooklyn indy label, Starcleaners, and are just back in town from an epic year of touring Europe with Japanther, and to the Chaos in Tejas and Do You Hear We? Punk fests.
Read more here
Listen to music here