Ecstasy and Reminiscence: Nights Out in Los Angeles.

Emerging with fits and starts from a prolonged, challenging quarantine and its social isolation, we celebrate the return to sharing physical space and intimacy by reflecting on Los Angeles nightlife and live performance, particularly the richness and vibrancy that live in the margins and fringe after dark. Tonight's works draw poignant threads that link Los Angeles dance floors, art galleries, artists, backyards, and dark rooms from the 1980s through the present day, where ecstatic moments collide with mortality and for so many of us, "going out" was going home.

• Pacoima Techno & Soltera kick off the night with collaborative video work and live performance.

Pacoima Techno use their experience growing up in the San Fernando Valley, specifically Pacoima, as the basis for their music, live performance, and community organizing. https://www.instagram.com/pacoimatechno/

In addition to creating sultry, hard-edged dance music, Soltera hosts the online radio program Todo O Nada, centralizing electronic music's roots and influences across genres while featuring underrepresented artists globally and locally. https://www.instagram.com/soltera818/

• A screening of Artbound: Mustache Mondays (directed by Marianne Amelinckx, 2021, PBS), 55 min.

"See how a roving LGBTQ night club event in Los Angeles called Mustache Mondays became a creative incubator for today's leading-edge contemporary artists. This film examines the history of these spaces and how they shaped the Queer cultural fabric unique to Southern California." – PBS

• A new performance work by Creepypasta Puttanesca (aka Alice Cunt):

"Creepypasta Puttanesca is a dish best paid for in advance as she is a hearty serving of a hauntingly delectable specter of the digital realm, a finger-licking ghost in the machine that comes with a complimentary order of all-you-can-eat breadsticks and a side salad. Beverage sold separately." - Creepypasta

• IN THE GALLERY: CHET BARBOUR

In the mid to late 2000s, Long Beach artist Chet Barbour used his Polaroid camera (hand-painted by Madame B aka Katie Brekenridge) to document the scenes of queer Los Angeles nightlife, capturing his circle of friends and strangers at parties including Mustache Mondays, A Club Called Rhonda, Fingered, and Shits & Giggles, as well as local parties and bars. Working under the name Chet B, he posted his work online at https://thelbcandlastreetscene.blogspot.com & https://myspace.com/thelbcandlastreetscene.

Curator

Dino Dinco is a film and theater director, performance art curator and maker, writer, and lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego. Based in Tijuana, México, his work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, in group shows internationally, and is included in the collection of Le Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain de Haute-Normandie, France, as well as private collections in Paris, Antwerp, Brussels, Los Angeles, Barcelona, New York and London. Dinco's first feature-length documentary film, Homeboy, explores gay Latino men who were in gangs. His award-winning short film, El Abuelo, with San Antonio poet Joe Jiménez, premiered at the Tate Modern, has screened internationally, and is included in the online LGBTQ film platform, Frameline Voices. Dinco co-founded You Wear it Well (2006-2008), the first traveling international film festival dedicated to short films on fashion. He was a Consulting Producer on the Fall 2021 installment of KCET's Artbound documentary film series which profiled the itinerant Downtown Los Angeles queer dance party, Mustache Mondays (2007 - 2018), of which Dinco was a co-founder. www.dinodinco.com