Hey there! Hair there?
Are you exceptionally hairy? Do you obsess over those stray hairs that sprout out of your chin, neck, armpits, and trickle down your thighs? Do you secretly squirm while talking to someone new, because you just know they are staring at those stray hairs on your cheek you haven’t had time to tweeze? Or you skipped a body waxing session and you can’t bear to be bare?
Perhaps you are perfectly at ease being a hairy person. You revel in the scorn left in your wake as you flaunt your hirsuteness. People even love that about you; your confidence, your furriness, the added charm of a hairy face or arms and legs to nestle into.
You are practically hairless. You never have to shave that peach fuzz that takes six months to thicken but you shave it all off anyway. Or maybe being hairless is a source of anxiety. It leaves you feeling softer than you want, less virile, colder.
Hairstory tells how your hair highlights or contributes to your culture, sexuality, color, religion and gender. Those characteristics or impositions and subsequent choices symbolize a life-altering that you never recovered from. Never recovered, and completely transformed into the person you are now.
You have long hair, short hair or none at all. It is a source of strength, of power. Of seduction even. Or a source of grief and loss. Further, it is a symbol of oppression that has marked your life in ways you are still reeling from. It is a powerful symbol of all that you have overcome and the stories you are burning to tell. One day, you chose to shave off all of your beautiful long locks in an act of defiance. One day you decided to grow your hair out to subvert the gender norm.
Hairstory is an art show and live performance at The Factory Art Gallery in Seattle featuring your art and stories about hair opening on April 14th, 2016. Tell us your Hairstory through music, writing, artifact, oral history, mixed media, visual art, storytelling, audio recording, or film. Scribble on a napkin, write a poem, record your history into a tape recorder, take a picture, make a collage, compose a dance, film yourself or a friend shaving their head or waxing their eyebrows. Submit a conceptual live performance act, including shaving your hair, waxing, tweezing, poetry performance, or haircuts, to be performed live at the gallery show. We want to see and hear and experience the resounding power and magic of your self-expression about hair.*
Hairstory seeks to cull submissions to be presented in the following categories:
1) Audio, film and photo storytelling: tell your significant hair story captured on audio, film, photo, montage or performance, interview someone or be interviewed, send us audio files or video files. These will be presented in a dark listening and viewing room within the gallery.
2) A zine: compiling stories, illustrations, poetry, journal entries, doodles, interviews, etc, on the theme of human hair
3) Strong visual art: We will be choosing between 3-5 visual artists to be represented in the show. Others may be featured in the zine.
If you think this show is not for you because you are not an artist or don’t have time, please forget all of that and submit to this project! Whether you have a Ph.D. in art and performance and are creating work with human hair, have been a barber all of your life, or just started thinking last week about the ways your hair has impacted your life and identity, this show is for you.
We are also eagerly accepting human hair donations! Your hair donations will be used in various ways as part of the show. With your hair donation, please include what part of the body the hair came from. Please contact Bryn at studiobryn@gmail.com for further details.
Submission form: http://goo.gl/forms/5mnVP3BD6n
Deadline for submission is April 1st, 2016.
You are welcome to make multiple submissions, one per form.
*Note about submissions: submission to the show does not mean entry. Your work will be thoughtfully considered and we will contact you about how we would like to use your piece(s).