Special Event | Friday, February 14, 7–10 pm
$7 General, $5 Members, free for ArtsAccess Pass holders
Ages 18+ only. Please review our community guidelines. 

Squeaky Wheel’s annual Valentine’s day event celebrating intimacy and sexuality returns with a special auditory edition. Listen to headphones filled with ASMR and other tracks by artists Erin Gee and Hope Mora; create a live soundtrack to a new film by Caroline Doherty; sing along to karaoke films by Michael Robinson, and Wayne Yung, and enjoy a performance by lyricist and hip hop artist Desiree Kee, and much more!

Program
7–8 pm: Listen to artist made audio tracks by Hope Mora and Erin Gee on remote headphones, and sing your heart out with karaoke!

8 pm: Come together in the microcinema to watch, listen, sing, and vocalize to films by Caroline Doherty, Dina Georgis and Sharlene Bamboat, Jess Dobkin, Lauren Fournier, Michael Robinson, Thirza Curthand, and Wayne Yung!

9 pm: Gather in the gallery to listen to a performance by lyricist Desiree Kee, followed by more karaoke!

Audio Works
Channel 1
Erin Gee, of the soone, 18:39 min, digital sound, 2019
Erin Gee leads the listener in a first-person roleplay as a specialist of a new experimental neural treatment: language processing and deprocessing. After a brief testing of equipment and EEG monitoring, Gee reads out the processes of a long-short term memory algorithm as it “learns” language from the classic book of passions gone awry, “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë. This exposure to machined-evolution of linguistic patterns is intended to reset or recalibrate human linguistic patterns in your brain, offering a form of abstracted, deep tissue neural “massage”.

Channel 2
Hope Mora, Sex With Harmony, 1:48 min; Basic Need With Dajah, sound, 1:21 min; My Neck My Back, Bell Hooks Love, and Magic Booty, 5:03 min, digital sound, all 2020

Screening program
Thirza Curthand, Helpless Maiden Makes An “I” Statement, 6 min, digital video, 1999
By using clips of evil queens/witches this video plays off the sadomasochistic lesboerotic subtexts commonly found in children’s entertainment. A helpless maiden is tiring of her consensual s/m relationship with her lover, and “evil” queen. She wants to break up. An impassioned monologue in a dungeon with our heroine in wrist cuffs quickly becomes an emotionally messy ending in flames. This video was inspired by the artist’s own childhood “kiddie porn”, Disney movies which turned her on to no end and kicked off many a prepubescent masturbation session.

Lauren Fournier, Sex and Death, 4 min, digital video, 2015
The performer re-frames the Freudian tension between eros and thanatos using the feminist tradition of performance for video. She repeats the locution “sex and death and sex and death and sex and death” aloud as she shimmies across the screen. The formal integrity of the loop meets the failures of the body, as the performer playfully moves across the screen, trying to catch her breath to continue the spell-like invocation. Sex and death— the drive toward binding (eros) and the drive toward destruction (thanatos)— are configured by Freud to be the two fundamental drives behind Western civilization. In this video, the Freudian tension is taken up through a floundering, vaguely sexual performance. The function of humour is something which has been increasingly (re)claimed by Canadian feminist video and performance artists in recent years, and is something that I find both politically efficacious and formally refreshing.

Jess Dobkin, It’s Not Easy Being Green, 3 min, digital video, 2011
A heartfelt and provocative rendition of Kermit the Frog’s melancholic It’s Not Easy Being Green, where the artist, in the role of Kermit the Frog, is fisted by a woman in drag in the role of Jim Henson. Together, as human puppet and puppeteer, they lip sync the much loved song. This film is a for-camera version of a performance previously presented to live audiences. For mature audiences.

Dina Georgis and Sharlene Bamboat, In Queer Corners, 6 min, digital video, 2013
In Queer Corners is a collaborative video by Dina Georgis and Sharlene Bamboat. The video examines the ways in which archives harbour stories, those that are spoken, and those left unsaid. Based on serendipitous encounters, and employing the language of dreams and desire, Georgis and Bamboat narrate each other’s stories and address the complications of queer re-tellings. In Queer Corners explores the limits and possibilities of the archive through the theme of narration and storytelling. Working with a found object from the dusty and neglected corners of the Canadian Lesbian & Gay Archive, this work explores how archival objects can come to life through their encounter with the present, with other desires, and with unexpected responses and meanings.
The archive, if left unexamined, works authoritatively to construct and stabilize knowledge. Though it selects and gathers signs unconsciously, what is held within its walls is neither arbitrary nor innocent. In resistance to interpret archival objects into a synchronized story of the past, In Queer Corners looks to its archival object as an affective placeholder from which new meanings and new stories can be made. The narratives recorded in this work respond to the found image in narrative accounts where the line between dream and reality is distorted. They speak a non-literal truth about desire, insecurity, despair, sex, race and class, and the difficulty of uttering and representing these very things. Knowledge itself is vulnerable, made in relation, and articulated in broken stories. Reaching for some thing or some place, the bodies represented tell unfinished narratives. Though the bodies stand alone, the line between self and other is obfuscated and they depend on each other to tell their stories.

Wayne Yung, One Night in Heaven, 5 min, digital video, 1995
In this queer Asian spoof of karaoke, a new boy in town discovers the dark side of the big city. The story follows his adventures to an underground club where sex and murder are in store.

Caroline Doherty, Rock, Soft Place, ~5 min, digital video, 2020

Michael Robinson, Hold Me Now, 5 min, digital video, 2008
Plagued by blindness, sloth, and devotion, a troubled scene from Little House On The Prairie offers itself up to karaoke exorcism. 

Desiree Kee

Dina Georgis and Sharlene Bamboat, In Queer Corners (2013)

Bios of the artists

Caroline Doherty is an artist based in Buffalo, NY. She employs multiple mediums, including performance, video, sculpture, and public projects. She has participated in residencies including the Squeaky Wheel Workspace Residency in Buffalo; the SOMA Summer Program in Mexico City; Guapamacátaro Center for Art and Ecology in Michoacán, Mexico; and ArtPark in Lewiston, NY. Her work has been exhibited throughout North America, in Europe, and in China. Caroline has been an educator for over 15 years, facilitating art making for youth, university students, and adults in formal and informal settings in the US, Mexico, and Canada.

Desiree Kee is a 25 year old lyricist that was born and raised Queens, Ny. She moved from NYC to Maryland in 2002 and later relocated to Buffalo, NY in 2011. She currently has two projects available on her soundcloud which is I AM NOT A RAPPER EP (2017) and This Mixtape Is A Cry For Help (2019) as well as 4 self-directed visuals which can be found on her youtube.

Hope Mora is a visual artist from West Texas, currently teaching and completing her MFA at The University at Buffalo and holds a BFA from Texas State University in San Marcos. She has shown work in selected gallery and public space exhibitions in Central Texas and Western New York, such as Mexic-Arte Museum, Public Art San Antonio, Anna Kaplan Contemporary, and The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art.

The Love & Sex Show: Sweet Nothings is sponsored by City Wine Merchants and SE2 Silent Disco.

Banner image: Wayne Yung, One Night in Heaven (1995).