Join us for an artist-led discussion about our inaugural virtual exhibition, Joey De Jesus: HOAX. Visual artist Joey De Jesus and BRIC's Chief Curator, Elizabeth Ferrer, will lead a walkthrough of the exhibition on Zoom, talking about the works on view and answering questions.

In HOAX, a "living book in sections," Joey De Jesus explores intersections of poetry, technology, mysticism, and performance as a means of connecting the spiritual to the scientific, the individual to the cosmos. The exhibition title, as De Jesus notes, suggests the suspension of rational thought required to believe the world anew, despite the willful oppression that surrounds us. An artist’s book, NOCT: The Threshold of Madness, is the exhibition's centerpiece. De Jesus's erasures and drawings over selected texts on the pages of a popular “how to” book of black magic act to repress sentiments predicated on anti-Otherness, or moments in which the black or queer were likened with evil. This project also includes suede leather scrolls encoded with laser-etched celestial maps/poems, and hand-drawn paper scrolls used in performance. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joey De Jesus is a queer boricua/x from the Bronx living in Queens. They edit poetry for Apogee Journal and are currently developing Apogee's low-cost writers workshop with support from the Brooklyn Arts Council and New York Writers Coalition. De Jesus received a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry with additional honors. Their forthcoming chapbooks and full-length collections of poetry include: Writing Voice in the Archive (UC Berkeley Center for Race & Gender, 2019), NOCT: The Threshold of Madness (The Atlas Review, 2019) and HOAX: Planisphere (The Operating System, 2020). Poem-objects have been installed and performed in Basilica Soundscape, the New Museum, and Artists Space. Poems have been published in Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bettering American Poetry, Black Rabbit Review, Brooklyn Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a- Day feature.