AUSTIN -- LIBRES Y LOKAS, OTIS IKE & Ivete Lucas -- August 1

AUSTIN -- LIBRES Y LOKAS, OTIS IKE & Ivete Lucas -- August 1, originally uploaded by Domy Books.

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Domy Books is pleased to present

LIBRES Y LOKAS
el Espectaculo de la Pobreza

photos and video by
OTIS IKE & Ivete Lucas

Saturday, August 1, 2009 at Domy Books, Austin
913 E Cesar Chavez, Austin, TX 78702
7-9pm, FREE ADMISSION

Exhibition runs August 1–September 3, 2009

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For their second Austin installation OTIS IKE and Ivete Lucas present work culled from their experience embedded amongst Monterrey performers living in extreme poverty. Titled Libres y Lokas, the installation documents the lives of two distinct but perhaps inherently tied groups: lucha libre wrestlers and transgendered queens.

For many the figure of the Lucha is part and parcel of popular culture – brightly colored and flamboyant face masks parading on Univision. The performers documented by OTIS IKE are far away from such international fame. Instead of well-lit arenas these wrestlers spar in empty lots for a little money, which they funnel back into their art and use to buy more outfits and masks. In this context Lucha is a bloodsport, often resulting in extreme bodily harm. The stories of these men and women (and sometimes boys and girls) are fraught and often involve other performative and marginal professions – many Luchas begin their careers as body-builders and/or strippers.

Like the Lucha, the transgendered female performer is a figure known to many but understood by few. Even in the poorest neighborhoods in Monterrey these women perform a kind of opulence and bourgeois taste that belies the amount of money they make on a given night. Performing for audiences largely consisting of women and gay men, these women make themselves up like contemporary pop stars. In Otis Ike’s photographs and Ivete Lucas’s video we see these women at home and with their families, performing in the downtown Monterrey drag club Muxets, as well as in the infamous gay club Wateke.

In each world exists certain hierarchies. Within Lucha is a simulated distance between the handsome and benevolent technicos, and the fat and maleficent rudos. The exoticos, wrestlers who perform outwardly gay characters, are ostracized by rudos, technicos and the audience. Within the drag and tranny clubs there exists a less outwardly performed, yet still present, sense of division. The young and skinny inhabit the Lady Gaga-type while such performances are off-limits to the larger queens. In both the Lucha and tranny worlds the audiences are small, yet the performances themselves are large and exuberant.

In Libres Y Lokas the artists will build a series of immersive environments mimicking and confronting the built and found environments that contain these dynamic performers. The installation includes a series of large-format photographs set in hand painted frames, a series of wall sculptures that quote vernacular styles of mask display, a double-channel video, a group of personal photographs from some of the performers they met along the way, along with silkscreened glass and cinderblock architectural elements. The show will be accompanied by a handmade catalogue made in the style of Lucha autograph books that will feature real photographs from Otis Ike’s travels and an essay by art historian Andy Campbell.

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OTIS IKE is most noted as a roving builder, photographer and video maker living and traveling in a Volkswagen RV with two dogs, 6 cameras, tools and an archive of Art Bell radio programs. He has exhibited photography across the US, Art Slant in Madrid, Spain and was an installation builder for Clare Rojas and Barry McGee. He now resides in Austin, TX and be studying a masters in Sustainable Design at UT in the fall.

Ivete Lucas, born in Brazil, is a photographer and filmmaker who moved to Austin from Monterrey, Mexico. In 2007 she was awarded a grant by the Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE) to produce and co-direct her first short film, Asthma, an amalgamation of moments in the lives of the tenants of a beat up apartment building. She is currently working on a documentary with OTIS IKEon Vietnam War reenactors. She will be attending the Radio, Television, and Film graduate program at UT in the fall.

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LINKS
OTIS IKE: http://homepage.mac.com/patrickxavier/PhotoAlbum125.html