The Void Gallery

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CARLA DE JESUS JEREZ

Carla de Jesus Jerez is an emerging filmmaker/actor/writer tackling institutional betrayal through the medium of humor. Starting with a background in stand-up and sketch comedy, they moved into filmmaking to combine visual and performance art to build esteem around femme and queer forms of expressions, as well as to reveal alternate femme and queer histories through the re-appropriation of popular culture, memetics and iconography. In collaboration with their artistic partner J Aaron Byrnes, they have co-founded a queer and BIPOC-led internet collective witchess! where they have premiered their most recent works, the web series pilot for the sketch comedy The Girlgang AU, as well as the short film Offline. They were a 2018-2019 Borscht Corp fellow and they have acted in, produced, written, directed, and art directed multiple works that screened at the 2019 Borscht Film Festival. They have also worked professionally as a stylist, most recently with the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau (GMCVB) for the #VisitMiamiLGBTQ series. Prior to that, they were an active comic and showrunner in Tallahassee, Florida, co-founding the femme and queer comedy collective Humortals.

NIKO MITSUKO

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Niko Mitsuko is an award winning American photographer, painter, and mixed media artist. She began her artistic career at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, graduating in 2007 with a BFA in Fine Art and Photography and a BA in Film. In the past ten years she has established herself as a professional artist, working primarily with galleries in her long time home of Portland, Oregon as well as across the US, but also exhibiting internationally in Paris, London, and most recently Berlin, where she is now based. 

“My work is multi-faceted and encompasses photography, painting and mixed media. Recently with the shift in the world’s climate my work has morphed toward the abstract.  in hope to fully encapsulate my environment be it political or spiritual. Aside from what maybe the new normal of having exhibitions go mostly online and making it more difficult to connect in person with people in person. I’ve recently created work that is centered around the idea of breathing and what breath means and looks like. This is also not just COVID but what the BLM movement encompasses. Our air, that which gives us life, how precious it is and even more so now.”

JAZZY REED

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Consumerist Cavities
“I wrote this poem as a way to deal with my frustration regarding the COVID19 pandemic. I found (and still do find) myself very frustrated by people ignoring the pandemic and continuing on with their daily lives as though their acts do not put people in danger. From that frustration it became very clear to me how the system of capitalism is one of the main causes of people’s selfishness (along with individualism). The language I chose should bring to mind images of sugar. I chose sugar-like imagery to connect the root of capitalism in the New World (sugar-cane production in the West Indies) to its horrendous effects on people. These effects are well known, yet people keep consuming anyway.”

Thoughts on my Drive to Work
“The town I work in is very small. Most of its residents are white, and there is very little diversity. One day as I drove to work, the sky was gray and fog was rolling in. As I drove down the main road that takes you through downtown, I saw a church steeple rise high. It occurred to me that this little town is the same little town you would find anywhere in the United States. It was these small towns all throughout history where black men and women found themselves the most in danger. I thought of my place in this town and wondered if I had any. I wondered if anyone in this town found themselves affected by the Black Lives Matter movement or the unjust murderers of black people at the hands of law enforcement. This poem was born of these wonderings.”