Downtown LA

Hard to Read

Hard to Read

HARD to READ: practical magic, s-p-e-l-l-s, and love.

Francesca Lia Block
Amanda Yates Garcia
Sojourner Truth Parsons
Suné Woods 
and Jacky Flowers!

Parsons and Woods are painters. Yates Garcia is a practicing witch, "the Oracle of Los Angeles." Lia Block is a poet and author with a forthcoming memoir, famous for Weetzie Bat, among other titles. Flowers is a perennial.

Francesca Lia Block is the Lifetime Achievement Award winning author of over thirty acclaimed and widely translated books of fiction, non-fiction, short stories and poetry. She has also written a screenplay for Fox Searchlight and contributed essays, interviews and reviews to many publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nylon and Spin. Francesca teaches at Antioch University, Los Angeles and UCLA Extension and is currently finishing her memoir/writing guide The Thorn Necklace: Turning Pain into Art coming in 2018 from Seal Press.
http://www.francescaliablock.com

Amanda Yates Garcia is an artist, writer, witch, healer and the Oracle of Los Angeles. Recent performance rituals include Capitalism Exorcism at Human Resources and Devouring Patriarchy at the Women’s Center for Creative Work. Her work has also been featured at Side Street Projects, the Hammer, REDCAT, Public Fiction, Highways Performance Space, San Diego Art Institute, and the Laband and Ben Maltz galleries among others. Yates Garcia hosts The Oracle Hour on KCHUNG radio; teaches the Magical Praxis monthly mystery school; and performs private rites of healing and empowerment at her magical studio in West Adams. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Black Clock, the Rough Magick anthology, EntropySynema Publikationen, and WITCH. She has attained a CCI ARC grant, a Kodak film grant, an Ahmanson Foundation Scholarship, and a dual MFA from California Institute of the Arts.
http://oracleoflosangeles.com/

Suné Woods is an artist living in Los Angeles. Her work takes the form of multi-channel video installations, photographs, and collage. Woods practice examines absences and vulnerabilities within cultural and social histories. She also uses microsomal sites such as family to understand larger sociological phenomenon, imperialist mechanisms, & formations of knowledge. She is interested in how language is emoted, guarded, and translated through the absence/presence of a physical body. She has participated in residencies at Headlands Center of the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Light Work in Syracuse. Woods is a recipient of the Visions from the New California initiative, The John Gutmann Fellowship Award, and The Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer.
http://www.sunewoods.com

Sojourner Truth Parsons was born in 1984 in Vancouver, was educated at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design in Halifax, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Tomorrow Gallery, New York, and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. Group shows include Foxy Production, New York; Galerie Sultana, Paris; Cooper Cole, Toronto; and Know More Games, New York.
http://canadianart.ca/features/sojourner-truth-parsons/

Jacky Flowers, aka saoirse or sairsha felony thirty three, could be a character in one of Francesca Lia Block’s early novels. Witch Baby. Baby Be-Bop. Weetzie Bat. Or ...and the Goat Guys. 

http://sicklucy.tumblr.com/