This is who I am, and this is who you want me to be. 

I have been shaped by my experiences with society. 

Your institutions are molds that are impressed on me.  

- april vendetta

“I believe in a world rooted within the practice of archiving as an act of repair. Each shared archive can become a resource and generate conversations that have the potential to aid in reckoning with past and present injustices of the world. To record and review creative self-expression is something that can be an incredibly empowering and humbling experience. I want to live in a world without the threat of violence or imprisonment, where we can be witnessed and be a witness to each other with empathy.”

- april on archiving

DUPLEX is pleased to present Body of/and Work, april vendetta’s first solo exhibition. For vendetta, archiving is an act of radical repair. As an archivist and performance artist, Body of/and Work explores new forms of recorded creative self-expression and questions how to make them readily available from now and into the future. Through a fragmented and at times collaborative DIY process, Body of/and Work traces vendetta's documented self by using physical and digital media to create a cumulative portrait (often done with the assistance of their life partner Elizabeth Lamb). Combining sculpture, photography, film, installation, and live performance, vendetta presents interlinking commentary on the systems that surround, imprison and liberate us, revealing the power and connection of individual and collective storytelling and demonstration. 

Taking their name from the month they were born and the title of a painting made by their late uncle, Kent Bellows, a replica of which isincluded in the exhibition, vendetta presents films that incorporate VHS home movies made by Bellows and discovered by april in the wake of his sudden death in 2005. This excavation of familial histories brings humor and vulnerability into vendetta's work and creates a through line to their inspiration and expression through sci-fi, tattoo culture, BDSM community, and gender play. Upon entering the exhibition the viewer is met with an installation that echoes both a community gathering space and an artist studio - embellished photographic prints of vendetta hang amongst video artworks displayed on varying monitors, and a display of collected paraphernalia leads to a corkboard of text sourced from social media comments, unpaid job ads, and negative art reviews exemplative of the ever-shifting social contracts and uneven power dynamics within the structure of our systems. Signage indicates an inventive use of the "back room", inviting the public to sort through photographs of recent performance work and films transferred to VHS, which can be played upon selection. In Body of/and Work the public is an active participant in the discovery and gathering of information, simulating the experience of finding pathways within archival work and societal discord.  

In new films such as DOG WILL NOT EAT DOG (2022) vendetta receives a tattoo from ongoing collaborator tattooist, Allie Landry. The film and the tattoo act as a proclamation of the ongoing mistreatment of people, animals, and the planet under late capitalism. More specific labor-based examples include the crisis of debt and the circular cycle of employee mistreatment, stagnant wages, and expectations for unpaid work. Here the body becomes embedded with a phrase of confrontation and becomes a testament to the permanence of the frustration. In WAR (2021/2023) the embellished photographic image was taken during a public action where vendetta held the letters W.A.R. as balloons, outside the New York Stock exchange. Plastic army men surround the perimeter of the metal print on clothespins, an inexpensive item used in BDSM, and hold up a paper sign reading “DEBT.”

Attracted to performance and the archive as a form of protest, vendetta, in Body of/and Work, ultimately asks how we want our work to be experienced by others, and reveals how platforms we often look to for documenting the self, such as social media or through institutional support, might, in the end, do more to erase the margins than preserve the whole. In Body of/and Work vendetta offers interaction and engagement and urges viewers to challenge the ways in which we promote and engage in the systems that we are reliant on for preservation.

Body of/and Work will be open through February 28th. Performances and tattooing by Allie Landry will be featured at announced times throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Full press release here.

wage stagnation (DUPLEX edit), 

digitally scanned super 8, 2019, 

camera operator Elizabeth Lamb

Flurries, Kent at the Piano, 12/23/89, 

VHS transferred to digital file

camera operator Kent Bellows 

DOG_WILL_NOT_EAT_DOG.PDF

DOG WILL NOT EAT DOG, 2023

Performance - 1, February 5, 2023 (Shift #3) 

DUPLEX, 17 Essex Street

Episode 036: Library Punk - HTD