2024 Hotbox Residency
Venese Alcantar and Leah Danze
August 4th - September 1st, 2024
Venese Alcantar is a xicanx movement practitioner, choreographer, and educator. Venese’s work challenges notions of gender and sexuality, female archetypes, and the body as landscape. Within their work the observer finds explorations of corporeal wit, human narratives through anthropomorphic expressions, and the intermingling acts of birthing and composting. Their work has shown at the OhrO’keefe Museum of Art, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, the Terri Goodhue Gallery, and the Blanton, to name a few. Venese has worked with Ormao, HIJACK, Body Shift, ARCOS, Girl Forward and others. Venese was an artist in residence with Pantera, while conjunctively teaching at Kazan University of Culture and Art, in Kazan, Russia. In addition, some of their teaching experience includes the teaching residency at the Beulah School of Natural Sciences, adjunct at the Colorado Springs Conservatory, the Positive Note Program for people with mixed abilities, Danza facilitator at the Indigenous Cultures Institute and a DEL Arnhold Fellow.
@v.morology
Leah Danze is a painter, psychotherapist, art therapist, and cultural worker whose creative practice responds to attempts at “ordering” nature and society. Their large-scale paintings become animated entities that extend beyond the canvas and into their surroundings, illuminating the role of interdependence and play in subverting rigid frameworks. They have shown their work at Apna Ghar, a Chicago-based organization working to end gender violence; at queer community gathering space Lil Deb’s Oasis in Hudson, NY; at the Aquarium Gallery in New Orleans, LA; at Austin’s Montopolis Bridge with art duo Mirrored Fatality; and at the Aupini Space in Honolulu, HI. They have collaborated with artists from La Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia and have shown their work at Printed Matter with Tropic Zine.
@danzdance
For the 2024 HOTBOX Residency, these two artists will be sharing the space for the month of August in an embrace of cross-pollination. Danze and Alcantar see this as an opportunity to collapse the distinction between healing and creating as a private matter and instead center art making as an interventional strategy towards collective care. The artists’ residency brings together natural dyeing, sewing, facilitated movement exploration, and performance. They intend to weave the fabric created during the residency into a site-specific movement score, delving into themes of fluidity, interdependence, rupture, and repair. Community members will be invited to participate in many aspects of this process, learning, making, and sharing alongside Alcantar and Danze.
Mark your calendars for August 24th, from 7-9 PM, to join the artists for their Close Encounters public programming event.
