THE BLACK PILL
Originally commissioned by Los Angeles Performance Practice, THE BLACK PILL is a two-hour writing workshop that asks its artist-participants to take a daring look in the mirror and honestly answer why and for whom they make their work.
Drawing examples from artists as diverse as Bracha Ettinger, Xandra Ibarra, Rindon Johnson, Slavs and Tatars, Cameron Rowland, Andrew Norman Wilson, and Can Xue, the workshop will review several approaches to first-person storytelling and narrative arguments within an interdisciplinary context. Ultimately, participants should leave the session with compelling language to describe their work and practice as well as a strong sense of how that language can be applied to grants, project proposals, and work descriptions. Participants are encouraged to bring short writing samples, bios, artist statements, and other contextual materials as the workshop will culminate in a live editing session.
RATIONALE
Whether applying for grants, inviting collectors to support their practice, or presenting their projects to a public audience, artists must frequently convey years worth of activity in the span of a few sentences. Without concise and heartfelt language, they risk losing funding, exhibition performance opportunities, and the ability to invite new dialogue about their work.
Holding that the confidence and rigor artists apply to their practice provides the most meaningful connection to their audience, the workshop offers an intimate setting to explore the stories that often remain unsaid in written and spoken supplementary materials.
THE BLACK PILL directly addresses these conjoined issues by interrogating the function of these descriptive statements and demystifying their demands. Seeking common ground between institutional narratives about artistic practice, the workshop seeks to alleviate tensions surrounding self-examination and the performance of various competencies.
THE BLACK PILL acknowledges that consolidating the experiments, investigations, insights, failures, and rewards of an artist’s unique practice into an undersized container is no easy task. But that doesn’t mean the process of translation can’t be pleasurable or worthwhile.
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WYATT CODAY is intersex and autistic. She lives between Los Angeles and Chicago, where she is a practicing financial dominatrix. Coday describes her practice as “research performance” and offers her labor as a “unique instance of Black melancholy.” Her work spans legal interventions, essays and contemporary folk tales, unorthodox disability accommodations, lecture-performances, and photography. In 2020, Coday was named as a columnist-in-residence at Open Space, SFMOMA's online writing platform. In 2021, Coday received an emerging artist grant from the California Arts Council and published 4 INSTRUMENTS, an excerpt from her in-progress novella, with Apogee Graphics. Nightboat Books anthologized another excerpt in WE WANT IT ALL: AN ANTHOLOGY OF RADICAL TRANS POETICS (2021). In 2023, Dirt published RESEARCH, a third installment of the novella.
Her writing has appeared in Into, The Avery Review, Open Space (SFMOMA), X-TRA, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and her sculpture and photography were included in Red Wedding at Ruschman in Chicago. Her research interests include: disability, psychoanalysis, common law, transitive painting, the lecture-performance, and kitty cats.
NOR RESEARCH STUDIO is a research design studio that develops didactic media, exhibitions, publications, and other forms of intellectual property for artists, nonprofits, and creative businesses.