Performance: Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Come Hell or High Femmes: The Era of the Dolls

Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Come Hell or High Femmes: The Era of the Dolls
Closing performance: Saturday, July 15, 7pm

JOAN presents the Los Angeles debut of Keioui Keijaun Thomas’s latest work, Come Hell or High Femmes: The Era of the Dolls. An immersive film and multimedia performance, the piece imagines a lush and verdant post-apocalyptic world inhabited by surviving “dolls”—trans femmes so flawless they are no longer considered real. Through forms of camouflage and metamorphosis, the artist reclaims what it means to be Black and queer in nature, forging new ways to exist in relation to the U.S. American landscape.

This iteration of Come Hell or High Femmes will be adapted for the artist’s first institutional show in Los Angeles, No Longer Strange Fruit, on view at JOAN through July 15. The exhibition brings together a selection of the artist’s projects from 2012-2022, emphasizing the multiplicity of ways in which her work examines and engages with the entangled histories of labor, subjugation, and resistance. The multimedia project includes video and sculptural installations, archival materials, and performance ephemera, all of which build on her interest in the affective, material, and economic conditions of Black identity formation and embodiment.

Lighting: Sebastian Hernandez and Tony De Jesús
Sound: Adam Otto Lutz

Come Hell or High Femmes is made possible with funding from The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, and Mellon Foundation.

Keioui Keijaun Thomas is a New York-based artist. She creates live performance and multimedia installations that address blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Her performances combine rhapsodic layers of live and recorded voice, slipping between various modes of address, to explore the pleasures and pressures of dependency, care, and support. By centering self and communal care in real-time, Thomas’ practice aims to build bridges of understanding and community. Thomas has performed at numerous festivals nationally and internationally, and has presented solo performances at The Knockdown Center, New York (2018); Harvard University, Cambridge (2018); Performance Space UK, Folkestone, UK (2016); Housing NY, Brooklyn (2016); and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2015). Recent solo exhibitions include Come Hell or High Femmes, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio (2022); and Hands Up, Ass Out, Participant Inc., New York (2021). Thomas is a 2022 recipient of the MAP Fund, the inaugural winner of the Queer|Art 2020 Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, and the Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient for 2018. She earned her Master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA with Honors from the School of Visual Arts in New York.

IMAGE: Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Come Hell or High Femmes: The Era of the Dolls, Abrons Art Center, 2023. Photo by Christopher Sonny Martinez.

Performance documentation by Monica Nouwens.