Announcing inaugural SAASy Resident Artist : Greer Sikes
This January, we are proud to invite and celebrate artist Greer Sikes as the first SAASy Resident Artist, in collaboration with Grotto 101 Performance Lab! We are thrilled to begin this journey with them as they develop new, enticing, contemplative, and raw performance art and more...
Exhibitions and showcases of their works-in-progress will be listed on the South Austin Arts Society calendar. Coming soon!
Artist's Residency Goals
"To create and investigate both personal and collective works and immersive experiences/gatherings that are structured from an ethos of “Matriarchy,” which I am also developing into a translatable system of working for creatives and anti-capitalists in their communities. By the end of the residency I hope to offer events to the community which allow them to engage with this format, as well as continuing to develop some of my own personal projects which will ultimately be offered to the community, such as Pleasure Church."
“We do not judge. We do not hate. We only love.” - Sarah Matusek
"What does matrianarchical art & process look like? What do matrianarchical spaces feel like and allow for? What do matrianarchical systems and structures create, heal and reveal? What do we want for and from one another—moving forward? And are we ready to make these changes real?"
What I want South Austin Arts Society Residency (SAASy) to be for me as an artist & producer?
"A shame-free safe space for queer, trans and non-conforming identities to connect, create and express without censorship. A matrianarchical cave for the sensuous experience of coexistence to be felt outside of traditional patriarchapitalist systems and structures. Freedom to love and be loved in return—without judgment of the shape, size and form of that love. A place to unleash the animal within from the cage of society."
Artist Bio
Greer is anti-labels and pro-complexity:Greer is a queer, gender-free, sex & self-love championing, pagan, socialist, (probably other stuff) performance artist whose work is a combination of auto-ethnographic abstraction for challenging perception alongside salacious trickstering. As Trixter, the desire of Greer's work-play is to set the human animal free from the cage of society by subverting and challenging the systems and beliefs that keep us from being our true selves. A self-proclaimed shame slut,Greer creatively embraces what society considers "other" in order to question what makes it shameful: their performances and immersive experiences indulge in curiosity and coexistence while challenging systems & beliefs that lead to exclusion.Greer's ultimate mission as an artist and animal is to construct shame-free performances & spaces which encourage play, absurdity and self-expression in loving conjunction with a reverence and honest exploration of the deep pain and degradation of the authentic self while living--and serving--as a caged animal within a man-made society.Greer wants matrianarchy.
Greer has performed and had work produced on international stages in London, Edinburgh, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin and more. They also occasionally produce & host Scratch Chapel: a works in progress showing for alternative live art. They have a BFA in Drama from New York University and a dual MA/MFA in Performance Art from the University of Chichester/CIIS, respectively. Their most recent work, Feminists: reMounted at The Vortex in Austin, resulted in only 6 walk-outs--to their disappointment.
