Screaming Wind Dog Fight is a record of spoken poetry. The texts were developed following the artist's experience of a super typhoon that occurred while visiting his birthplace of Saipan in 2018. It was read from a score that allows for different permutations. Typed in bold condensed letters, the language is rooted in a matrix of words that appear and interchange in slight iterations. Each of the 15 texts are included on a 2-sided poster. The LP cover features a Fregata minor bird, better known to some native Chamorro speakers as Paya'ya (pronounced pa-jzah-jzah). A Paya'ya sighting is sometimes considered an indicator that a storm is coming.
Sid M. Duenas equates reading and writing, not limited to text alone, to an intricate view and understanding of attentiveness that draws from his cultural background. His work considers how the subject of a work may withdraw itself from legibility while drawing the viewer in, through their own inquiry or from contexts arranged by the artist toward a nexus of reads. The interplay of withdrawal and revelation brings to light a notion that absence is not a blank space, but active and spectral; producing, when attention is tuned, affect and meaning. The alteration of things and events through synthesis or Songi (Chamorro for 'burn') is a prominent conceptual underpinning in his work and is often visually described by the use of iterative art-making strategies.
Sid M. Duenas (b. 1973 in Saipan, lives and works in Los Angeles). Duenas has had solo exhibitions at the artist-run galleries in Los Angeles Mandujano Cell (2018), Artist Curated Projects (2017), and Safe Space (2016). His works have been exhibited at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles (2022), Material Art Fair in Mexico City, Mexico (2019), Converso in Milan, Italy (2019), ‘Ae Kai Cultural Lab/Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Honolulu, Hawai’i (2017), LAXART in Los Angeles, California (2017) and Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California (2017). In 2014 he received a grant from Art Matters Foundation. Duenas graduated with a BA in graphic design from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California (2002), and attended The Mountain School (2010), and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California (2014-2015).
A collection of tracks from the singer and multi-disciplinary artist's 111 collaboration series, featuring KMRU, Laraaji, and others. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 25, 2024