Artists Space

Abasement #87

Monday, June 15
7pm
Free, no RSVP required

Performances by WRENS, Embryoroom, Jeff Fuccillo, and Shelley Hirsch. DJ Perna. Visuals by Vampÿrates.

Magazine cut-outs and ink drawings are collaged together on a background of yellow, orange, blue, and red paper. Small pieces of paper with typewritten text listing the performers and event details are scattered around the flyer.
Flyer by Joe Frivaldi. [Magazine cut-outs and ink drawings are collaged together on a background of yellow, orange, blue, and red paper. Small pieces of paper with typewritten text listing the performers and event details are scattered around the flyer.]

Brooklyn-grown WRENS isn’t afraid to flutter its wings around the question, “Why not?” Stirring an eclectic assortment of sound, texture, and unabashed lyricism, the supergroup bolsters a casual-yet-maddening temperament that sets to ensnare the wandering listener into its nest. Jason Nazary (drums), Lester St. Louis (cello), Ryan Easter (trumpet/vocals), and Elias Stemeseder (keyboard/synths) wield their respective sabers with a dose of electronic flare on their inaugural release, “alligator shoes [on flatbush]”; enabling improvised, dynamic landscapes to get doused with occasional rap verses. Their sophomore album, Half of What You See, released November 21 2025 on Out Of Your Head Records & June 12th 2026 marks the occasion of the release of their first live cassette—LIVE @ NUBLU—also on Out Of Your Head Records.

Embryoroom is the multimedia practice of New York-based artist Edward Quist, whose work has blurred the boundaries between film, sound, installation, and performance since the early 1990s. While resistant to simple explanation, his audio-visual art explores themes of power, fear, and systems of control, unfolding against a backdrop that feels uncomfortably familiar. Quist is a pioneer of the audio-visual form. Working at a time before synchronized image and sound had found its contemporary grammar, he developed a practice in which moving image and composition are inseparable, each made to carry the weight of the other. That work found its home in galleries, institutions, and performance spaces across Europe, North America, and beyond, with presentations at MoMA PS1, the Finnish National Gallery, Museo Yancuic in Mexico City, and the Milan Film Festival, among others.

Jeff Fuccillo is a Portland-born, Tokyo-based guitarist. He founded Union Pole Tapes in 1993 and has produced over 100 catalog releases. Known for his work in Irving Klaw Trio, Hochenkeit, and currently Nishiga Higashi Ni, he has also released solo guitar/noise recordings under the name Wham-O and collaborated with John Fahey and Ayal Senior.

Shelley Hirsch has been pushing boundaries with her unique vocal art drawing on her life experiences, her memory, and her vivid imagination for decades. She has presented her compositions, staged multimedia works, improvisations, radio plays, installations, and collaborations in concert halls, clubs, festivals, theaters, museums, galleries, on radio, film, and television on five continents.

Perna, Miami-born and Brooklyn-based, is known for her flirtatious party energy and genre-defying sets. Since 2022, she has been one-third of Ladiez Drink Free, a collective now synonymous with controlled chaos on the dance floor. She is head of the DJ programming at LES institution Pianos. Her sets vary and often intertwine digital and vinyl, bringing a raw, moody energy to any dance floor.

The Vampÿrates are the swashbuckling visual DJ duo of Bradley Eros and Richard Sylvarnes. Under cover of perpetual dusk, the Vampÿrates, are as much actors as twisted plotters, equal-opportunity impersonators, as much art as artifice, criminals of piratical lore, as they masquerade as shred guitarists, savvy roommates, lyric poets, trouvé filmmakers, or plunderphonic soundbenders, when all they really want is jewels, bloody stolen booty, swished & swindled precious gems, pirated treasures of image and sound, from undead cultures that refuse to die, the so-called 'subversive blood languages' brought back to life through their trickery & deceit, mischief & sleight-of-hand, re-animation & thievery, and particularly, their re-contextualized excavation of exquisite samples, displaying their biting wit & unquenchable thirst for perversity & scandal. They cannot be killed, only ghosted, yet know, as always, that these nocturnal phantoms will return in other forms, deformed. New York Necro City.

Abasement has been curated by Joseph Frivaldi and Robert Mayson since 2015.