How To Build A Fire (May) @ Open Source Gallery
Thursday, May 25th, 7pm-9pm
Note: HTBAF happens every last Thursday of each month!
Where:
Open Source Gallery
306 17th St, Brooklyn, NY 11215
What:
Theme: Interwoven
4 x 15 min Stories
We continue to find ways to push back against the isolation and separation created by the pandemic. We know how important connectedness is, the ways it can feed and buoy us. How do we build those ties, draw around us the friends and loves that make us whole? Our theme for May is “Interwoven,” inspired by David Colosi’s Snaileidolia project, which is currently on display in the gallery. Join us for an evening of stories and community. Come sit by the campfire that is the warm heart of HTBAF.
Matt Vita
Matt Vita recorded his debut hour long comedy special in April 2023 and is spending the rest of the year touring, acting, shredding gnar and trying to be really nice to strangers! He has shared the stage with contemporary greats such as Joe List, and is the co-founder of the wildly successful Vermont Comedy Festival. He made his TV debut in 2022 opposite Queen Latifah on CBS and has several major TV and Film performances slated to be released in 2023. His podcast “Talking P!: The Opposite of Talking Shit” which he co-hosts with Will Purpura is slated to debut this spring!
Christy Miller
Christy Miller has been doing stand up for 27 years.
As a result of all her hard work, she has reconnected with Andrew “Dice” Clay and tours regularly with him. Over the years, Christy has been featured on such shows as “Best Damn Sports Show Period”, “Boy Meets World”, BET’s “Comic Mania”, Tammy Pescatelli’s “Stand Up Mother” and films like “Strange Days” and “Nixon”. She was also featured on Vinny Pastore’s “The Wiseguys Show” on Sirius XM and during her roller derby stint was the host of “Radio Free Derby” for the Gotham Girls Roller Derby. Her new album, “Brutally Yours” was released March 24, 2023 on iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, etc, wherever you stream your music. Nowadays, you can hear her weekly on her podcast “Celebra-TEA!” with Mark Riccadonna roasting the latest Hollywood headlines (as featured in the NY Comedy Festival and currently on Mark Cuban’s Fireside app) and her weekly all things stand up comedy “Old Skool New Skool Comedy” podcast on iTunes, Spotify, iHeart Radio and YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/christymillercomedy and https://www.youtube.com/@OldSkoolNewSkoolComedyPodcast/
Mary Edwards
Mary Edwards is a composer and sound artist whose interdisciplinary practice encompasses installation, film and theater scores, environmental soundtracks and cinematic audio. Themes of temporality, impermanence, nostalgia and the natural world recur throughout her work. She is interested in the invisible architecture and the emotive, historic and spatial properties of sound. Listening to, and describing sounds are an inherent and integral part of her process in conveying how all sounds have the potential to be habitable and can be transformative once you get inside them, as they are simultaneously intimate and immense. In 2021, The Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery produced her first career survey concurring with Something to (Be)Hold, her first large-scale public sound installation. As the 2022 Artist-in-Residence for the ACA Soundscape Field Station, she was living and working in Canaveral National Seashore, audio recording, and researching for her book and interactive project, “Conservation/Conversation” as part of Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her other awarded residencies include Headlands Center for the Arts, The Beach Institute, The William T. Davis Conservancy and The Arctic Circle Residency. In 2023, her work-in-progress, “Everywhere We Are is the Farthest Place,” premiered at The Spitsbergen Artists Center in Svalbard. The first in a series of odes rather than elegies to the transforming Arctic landscape comprises a composition and ambient field recordings gathered from landings around Svalbard while on a sailing expedition on a research vessel above the 78th parallel to record and document the sound properties of glacial geology and oceanographic data. Her extended discography includes the solo releases, A Smile in the Mind; Console; Eastern/Central & Mountain/Pacific; Natural Anthem; Endeavour: A Space Trilogy (inspired by the Space Shuttle expedition of NASA astronaut, Dr. Mae C. Jemison and Everyday Until Tomorrow, a conceptual “soundtrack” for TWA Terminal 5 at JFK airport. Her writing has been published by Oxford American, Invert/Extant (U.K.), The Mentor that Matters series, The Santa Barbara Literary Journal and the anthology, Joy Has a Sound: Black Sonic Visions. Mary Edwards holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Goddard College. She lives in New York and works internationally.
How to Build a Fire is a community storytelling series where a diverse group of individuals share real-life, personal narratives centered around a different theme each last Thursday of the month. At times funny, at times sad, their stories weave together a broad illustration of the human experience. How To Build A Fire will takes place at Open Source Gallery -a welcoming, nurturing, intimate, safe environment- where, monthly, one can see a new exhibition installed by an array of up-and-coming and established visual artists.
How To Build a Fire was founded by Terence Degnan. This year Stacie Evens and Lana Siebel will be co-curating and co-hosting.
Stacie Evans writes in long hand. With a fountain pen. Because she’s that girl: the wannabe homesteading, selectively Luddite girl who is addicted to her phone and regularly overshares online. She met James Baldwin in Paris … which will ever and always be the most glamorous and dramatic thing about her. Her writing has appeared in New South, After Ferguson, Bellingham Review, and The Rumpus.
Lana Siebel performs all over the US, including NYC, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, NJ, and Washington DC. She was selected as a featured comedian at The Connecticut Comedy Festival along with comedians such as Gilbert Gottfried, The Headliner Series in NY, The Punch Line Comedy Club in Philadelphia, as well as the Fairfield Comedy Club in Connecticut. As an actress, Lana is featured in numerous films and off Broadway plays. She studied acting at Lee Strasberg Institute and HB Studios with Austin Pendleton. Lana was also a competitive International Latin style Ballroom dancer ranked internationally and 7th in the US! She immigrated as a refugee from Kharkiv, Ukraine when she was seven years old with her family to Brooklyn, NY where she grew up and now resides.
This program is supported by the Puffin Foundation
