Book Launch & Performance ✨ Leila Weefur: Between Beauty & Horror at the Lab

Leila Weefur: Between Beauty & Horror
Book Launch & Performance

Friday, March 8, 2019
7:30pm doors / 8pm performance
Free admission

The Lab
2948 16th Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

*In the spirit of generosity, all who attend will receive a book for free.

Join artist, Leila Weefur and art critic, Elena Gross for a lecture-performance and book release in conjunction with Weefur’s solo exhibition Between Beauty & Horror at Aggregate Space Gallery. The book, published by Sming Sming Books & Objects, is an extension of the installation and features essays from Weefur & Gross.

Between Beauty & Horror is a video installation exploring the symbiotic nature of beauty and horror. The film’s poetic narrative explores this particular duality as an intrinsic part of the Black experience. It posits abjection, violence, and eroticism as the ingredients that make up the “between” and are considered to be the binding agents of Beauty & Horror. Visit the exhibition at Aggregate Space Gallery, 801 W. Grand Ave. Oakland, from February 15 – March 23, 2019. Opening reception, February 15, 6-10pm.

Leila Weefur (She/They/He) is an artist, writer, and curator who lives and works in Oakland, CA. She received her MFA from Mills College. Weefur tackles the complexities of phenomenological Blackness through video, installation, printmaking, and lecture-performances. Using materials and visual gestures to access the tactile memory, she explores the abject, the sensual and the nuances found in the social interactions and language with which our bodies have to negotiate space.

She is a recipient of the Hung Liu award, the Murphy & Cadogan award, and the Walter & Elise Haas Creative Work Fund. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including SFMOMA, Southern Exposure, The Wattis, and Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York. Weefur is the Audio/Video, Editor In Chief at Art Practical and a member of The Black Aesthetic.

Elena Gross is an independent writer and culture critic living in Oakland, CA. She received an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts in 2016, and her BA in Art History and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2012. She specializes in representations of identity through fine art, photography, and popular media. Elena was formerly the creator and co-host of the arts & visual culture podcast what are you looking at? published by Art Practical. Her most recent research has been centered around conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists. She has presented her writing and research at institutions and conferences across the U.S., including Nook Gallery, Southern Exposure, KADIST, Harvard College, YBCA, California College of the Arts, and the GLBT History Museum.