I spent the center part of this month in Los Angeles, doing a little bit of a lot of kinds of work. LA holds quite a bit of nostalgia for me as someone who spent so much time there in the second half of my 20’s, and being there now means revisiting a younger version of myself. The last time I was there to tattoo and see friends was in March 2020, and I cut the trip short due to the pandemic hitting full force, fearing getting stuck far from home during the crisis. Traveling there again meant catching up with a lot of clients and friends but also catching up with a changing city, learning what’s new, what’s gone (the iconic spinning foot sign), who has new families, homes, art practices, dogs...
A lot happened there in the span of a week and a half. I have a piece in Ahorita! at Charlie James gallery, curated by Ever Velazquez (on view through September 2nd), work in Friends and Lovers at Shulamit Nazarian (sharing a wall with my friend Alina Perez), and two ceramic pieces at the Cheech as part of Xican-a.o.x. Body alongside an astounding lineup of contemporary and historical Xicanx artists.
I also got to see Making in Between: Queer Clay, currently on view at AMOCA in Pomona. I was part of a program with the curator of the show, Pam Aliaga, and Nicki Green, an incredible ceramicist and thinker. We spoke about craft, coded symbolism, and contesting the idea of queer certainty in response to an incredible question from Eoin McGraw during the Q+A. The recorded conversation will be up soon.
Some highlights of my month:
Drylongso – Cauleen Smith’s debut 1998 film shares a name with the oral history collection by the same name, released a few years prior. Smith’s film has a distinctive saturation and set design that recalls theater staging, and her story of art student Pika and her cross-dressing friend Tobi navigating their own safety as a serial killer threatens their Oakland neighborhood transcends an easy genre categorization. Well worth seeking out, as is the oral history collection (unrelated to the film).
El Clasico tattoo ~ I was bowled over by the warm welcome I received in LA as a whole, but especially at El Clasico in Echo Park. One of the first tattoo shops in the area and owned by the legendary Sal Preciado, the shop is home to some of my favorite artists including Jesse Jaramillo aka Pinche Kid. After being at a private studio for the past few years, it was tons of fun to be reminded of why tattoo shops are such special social spaces, whether it be the storytelling that happens while working late into the night, the camaraderie of drawing together daily, or hosting a Barbie themed flash day. It was also lovely to tattoo returning clients and realizing I’ve been tattooing them for ten or eleven years, since I first began working in Los Angeles. I’ll be back soon, so if you’re LA-based and want to get on my guest spot mailing list, shoot me an email!
Tattoo by Sal Preciado
Glory hole reading ~ My friend J is someone whose taste I trust implicitly, so when they invited me to a vague “lecture on glory holes” I wasn’t going to miss it. The reading by CY X turned out to be more performance than presentation and I was totally entranced by the sound component, projection of a photo featuring a hole through the wall of a bathroom stall, and the words on their relationship to holes:
“The glory hole appeared to me during my teenage years and it shifted my entire worldview. I had not ever seen a glory hole myself nor had I heard anyone discuss them. I never heard about it in sex ed either. It only existed on the internet and by extension in the lives of adults who had the freedom to fuck and play with whoever they wanted whenever they wanted.
It became my personal symbol for freedom. It became my: I will know I am free when I see glory holes all around me. And so I spent, the bulk of my adult life looking for them and never found them myself.” – CY X, finding the glory in glory hole
TRANSIT by Cass Eddington ~ My dear friend Spencer gifted me a copy of Cass Eddington’s chapbook TRANSIT, right on time to fulfill my need for some new poetry. Cass is the curator of Vocational Poetics, which offers some incredible writing courses seasonally.
Freddy Mercury’s Mineshaft t-shirt in Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now video ~ After reading Olivia Laing’s essay on Freddy Mercury I rewatched this video, learning for the first time that the shirt he wore in the performance was for the Mineshaft, an iconic gay S&M club in Greenwich Village that was closed by the New York Health Department in 1985. As someone who is deeply invested in the ways we signal to each other, the coded and intimate languages that we write and read on the body, I was deeply moved by this memorialization in video. Freddy died in 1991 of bronchial pneumonia, a result of complications from AIDS, and watching him belt out an ecstatic “I'm a shooting star leaping through the sky,” shoulders shimmying in his shining black leather jacket, the word “MINESHAFT” barely glimpsable between lapels, brought me to tears in the lobby of the ACE hotel whose free wifi I was using.
Mineshaft entrance, 1980, image via the Leather Archives.
🌼 Flower World news: 🌼
Christina Gemora is back from maternity leave and taking appointments full-time beginning in August! The incredible Nas Dynasty is also at the studio full-time, doing imaginative and historically grounded ornamental tattooing. This month we have Samira Tattoos and Raychelle Ordoñez guesting, don’t miss them!
🌼 I have some appointments available in August for both flash and custom. Email to book!
🌼 I’ll be bringing back online workshops beginning next month as well – stay tuned for details there.
https://www.darkentriesrecords.com/store/merchandise/rex-mineshaft-t-shirt/
Mineshaft tees designed by REX