photo of “Romantic Comedy” performance CalArts 2021, image courtesy Sharon Lockheart.
About C. Bain
C. Bain is a gender liminal artist. His work focuses on interstices of sex and violence—the queer body as a site subjected to the extraction of knowledge. He is obsessed with language, and obsessed with the possibility of escaping it. Working mainly in writing and performance, he also makes videos, and works with paper, textile, and concrete. He also makes books with Falschrum Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, his friends, and by himself. He has performed at the Highline, the Getty Center, MOCA Los Angeles, the Broad Museum, Bard College, HKW Berlin, and at poetry venues across the US. His plays have been presented at the Kraine, the Tank, Dixon Place and the LGBT Center in NYC. He has a mental health focused social work degree from Hunter College and an art MFA from CalArts. A Lambda literary fellow, his first poetry book, Debridement, was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Awards. His second book, Sex Augury, is out on Red Hen Press. He participates in and sometimes coordinates community education at the Casino Cafe Clinic for Social Medicine. Currently, he lives in Germany and teaches real and imaginary classes on poetry, violence and the end of times.
contact
tiresiasprojekt [at] gmail.com
More bio, background
C. is originally from Worcester, MA, but was based in Brooklyn for many years. His primary form from the late 1990s until about 2013 was performance poetry. He participated in and coached many national poetry slam teams between 1999 and 2010. The practice eventually expanded into experimental theater-making (including training at the Barrow Group and The Actors Center, and working as an actor with Flux Theater Ensemble, Adin Walker, Kevin R. Free, Threadbare Theater Workshop, and others.) Eventually, through working with Alexandro Segade, Bain began to develop performance in an art context, which eventually led to a studio art MFA at CalArts.
At the same time, an interest in the relationship between performance and the trace or the archive plus the body of knowledge Bain developed while working at Ugly Duckling propelled him towards the Center For Book Arts creative publishing seminar and several subsequent workshops, as well as study at San Francisco Center for the Book.