MHYSA: Release Control (Rescheduled to October 1)
Please note: Due to weather conditions, this event has been rescheduled to Sunday, October 1. Doors are at 7:30 PM, with performances beginning at 8:30 PM. All tickets have been transferred to the new date. If you have questions regarding your order, please email info@pioneerworks.org.
MHYSA, artist E. Jane’s underground pop star alter ego, will premiere a new live set performing songs from their forthcoming EP, Release Control (2023). The evening will culminate with a DJ set by cry$cross.
Marking MYHSA's growth as a vocalist, producer, and collaborator, Release Control acknowledges the necessary negotiations between control and release in making music. The first project released by MHYSA since the artist’s move from Philadelphia to Brooklyn three years ago, the record serves as a deep study into rap, R&B, and ambient electronic music, experimenting with how these styles can merge and separate.
At Pioneer Works, MHYSA will perform with a full band, in a set that features a live video feed projected through both a lenticular and prism lens. These refractive apparatuses transform the performers’ bodily contours into ghostly silhouettes, casting a deliberately veiled and mediated image on stage. In doing so, the artist invites audience members to question the expectations of hyper-visibility so often imposed on Black divas and femmes.
Known for installations that merge music, art, performance, and persona, E. Jane began developing MHYSA in 2015 as part of a new media practice focused on the interiority and labor of Black women and femmes. Conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk—or “total work of art”—comprising video, performance, installation, and sound, Jane’s alter ego expresses the ultimate power of music to make utopian demands. MHYSA aims to create a world in which the needs, desires, and frustrations of Black femmes insistently take center stage.
MHYSA: Release Control is commissioned by Pioneer Works, and curated by Jane Ursula Harris as the second installment of her HERETICS series, which presents works by performance artists who straddle a music-fine art divide.
About the Artist
E. Jane (b. Bethesda, MD) is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by Black liberation and womanist praxis, their work explores the interiority and labor of Black women and femmes and the future of Blackness and queerness, as well as the perspectives of Black women and femmes navigating networked culture and surveillance. Since 2015, Jane has been developing the performance persona MHYSA, under which she released the critically acclaimed debut, fantasii, in 2018, and NEVAEH in 2020. The artist received their MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, and a BA in Art History with minors in English and Philosophy from Marymount Manhattan College in New York in 2012. Jane has performed at The Kitchen, MoMA, MoMA PS1 and Artist’s Space, as one half of sound duo SCRAAATCH alongside collaborator chukwumaa. In addition to winning the Wynn Newhouse Award in 2016, they have participated in residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2019-2020) and, as part of SCRAAATCH, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2022) and Bemis Center (2023). Jane is also the author of NOPE (a manifesto), published in Glitch Feminism in 2020. Their first museum solo exhibition, Drenched in Light, is currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
NYC-based DJ cry$cross’ genre-bending sound bridges the past and present to create a sonic new future. She pulls together nostalgic influence with New York City tempo club and techno to create a contemporary new sound.
About the Curator
Jane Ursula Harris is a Brooklyn-based writer who has contributed to Artforum, Art in America, Bookforum, BOMB, Cultured Magazine, The Paris Review, Flash Art, Frieze, The Believer, GARAGE, and the Village Voice, among other publications. Her essays appear in catalogues including Carnegie Mellon/ICA Miller’s Jacolby Satterwhite: Spirits Roaming on the Earth (2021); Kunsthalle Hamburg’s Werner Buttner: The Last Lecture Show (2021); Participant Inc.'s NegroGothic: M. Lamar (2019); Hatje Cantz's Examples to Follow: Expeditions in Aesthetics and Sustainability (2011); Kerber Verlag’s Marc Lüders: The East Side Gallery (2005); Phaidon’s Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (2005), Universe-Rizzoli’s Curve: The Female Nude Now (2003); Phaidon’s Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (2002); and Twin Palms' Anthony Goicolea (2003). Harris curates on a freelance basis, and is an art history faculty member at the School of Visual Arts.