Vanessa will read from her novel I See More Clearly in the Dark, and hannah will read from their short story collection, Everywhere that is wet.
Day/Dream will open to visitors at 7:30 PM. The readings will begin at 8:00.
Vanessa Holyoak is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist working across installation, photography, video, performance, and language. She constructs uncanny, minimalist environments that allude to mediation and memory, intimate and ecological loss, and the cognitive overload of the present. Through dreamlike juxtapositions of objects, moving and still images, light, and sound articulated through a speculative fiction lens, her work raises questions about cultural and ecological displacement and disappearance. She also writes art criticism and hybrid fiction and is researching the liberatory potential of dreams, sleep, and darkness across both literature and visual art. She received a dual MFA in Creative Writing and Photography & Media from the California Institute of the Arts and is pursuing a PhD in Comparative Media & Culture at the University of Southern California. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, New York City, and Mexico City, and published in BOMB, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Journal.fyi, East of Borneo, e-flux, and Hyperallergic. Her first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, was published by Sming Sming Books in May 2023. I See More Clearly in the Dark chronicles the experiences of a narrator referred to only as “I” as she wanders a dystopian near-future drained of life-sustaining darkness. This ethical and ecological desecration is lived out simultaneously by a parallel “I”: an amorphous, prehistoric or posthuman body, living and dreaming in a lush and tenebrous wilderness. The government has decided to wipe out national forests to install brilliant, homogenous resorts in which citizens are obliged to live under conditions of total illumination, the forest's expansive darkness remaining only as a memory and haunting source of imagination.
hannah rubin is a writer, poet, artist, and educator. Their writing about queer ecology and trans relationships has appeared in Artforum, F Magazine, The Seventh Wave, Canthius, and the Berkeley Poetry Review, among other publications and anthologies. Recent exhibitions and performances include: Water and Dreams at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; The earth must be on its back by now at Hyper Space, Los Angeles; and if i could bottle these letters as aromas at Midnight’s Watchtower, Los Angeles. Their work has been supported by Tin House, Lambda Literary Foundation, The Truman Capote Literary Trust, California Institute of the Arts, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, The Seventh Wave and The Center for Craft. They live in Los Angeles, where they run sticky poetry club in living rooms, backyards and galleries around town, co-host mellow drama on dublab radio, and ghost write for a somatic healer.