Sheerly Touch-Ya, Glendale, Queens
Sunday, July 28, 5-7 pm
Since May, Shanzhai Lyric’s roving archive of over 400 shanzhai poetry-garments, a piece they call “Incomplete Poem,” has been available for consultation at the Sheerly Touch-Ya hosiery warehouse in Glendale, Queens. Bringing the collection together in one place for the first time, Shanzhai Lyric continues thinking through the legacy of anti-enclosure movements as they connect to radical garment worker organizing. They look to the Luddites who, disgusted by the use of new technologies that threatened to put them out of work, smashed mechanized textile looms in organized acts of sabotage. The Luddite movement was named for its fictional leader Ned Ludd, a Robin Hood-like character who famously smashed his employer's looms in a fit of rage—in a hosiery factory.
Join us for a fashion show by Use Value, punctuated by a talk & conversation with sabotage scholar RH Lossin. Reception to follow at Topos Too.
Shuttle bus from Topos Too on offer.
Shuttle sign up: https://forms.gle/H5cqD7u8GzCZtvt18
Or email info@lunch-hour.net if you have any questions!
Pick up from Topos Too at 4:30pm ------> Shisanwu/Sheerly Warehouse in Glendale
(59-22 Myrtle Ave, Queens, NY 11385 ------> 74-12 88th street, Glendale NY 11385)
Pick up from Shisanwu/Sheerly Warehouse in Glendale 7:15pm ------> Topos Too
(74-12 88th street, Glendale NY 11385 ------> 59-22 Myrtle Ave, Queens, NY 11385)
Bios
Shanzhai Lyric is a body of research focusing on radical logistics and linguistics through the prism of technological aberration and nonofficial cultures. The project takes inspiration from the experimental English of shanzhai t-shirts made in China and proliferating across the globe to examine how the language of counterfeit uses mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies. Through an ever-growing archive of poetry-garments, Shanzhai Lyric explores the potential of mis-translation and nonsense as utopian world-making (breaking) and has previously taken the form of poetry-lecture, essay, and installation. @shanzhai_lyric
RH Lossin writes about labor, libraries, technology, contemporary art, and American radicalism. Her work has appeared in New Left Review, Salvage, Boston Review, Jacobin, e-flux, The Brooklyn Rail, and The New York Review of Books. She holds a PhD in communications from Columbia University and teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is writing a book about sabotage and American politics. @rhlossin
Use Value Use Value is a project in form of commerce initiated by Chang Yuchen in 2016. Use Value produces hand-labored useful commodities. Use Value believes art exists not only in museums but also in the mundane gestures of everyday life. Use Value measures artist's labor by the common rules of economic reality. The price of each product, the exchange value, is calculated by the average of all hitherto existing hourly rates that Yuchen has earned, multiplied by how many hours she has spent on this product, in addition to the cost of raw materials. @use_value
Sheerly Touch-Ya / Shisanwu LLC was founded in 1992 by James Chang, a migrant from Taiwan to the United States. The brand manufactures new hosiery as well as up-cycles dead stock inventory. The styles and packaging show indexes of James' American dream—images conformed by the contours of technology, fashion, and cultural discourse over many decades. James learned the ropes of the hosiery business in a warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, which for a period of time became the esteemed studio of Urs Fischer. James’ daughter Serena Chang’s seven-year tenure alongside Fischer in turn served as her apprenticing into the artistic and logistical world of sculpture fabrication, leading to the co-establishment of Shisanwu LLC. Both nestled in the warehouse at 74-12 88th Street, Queens, these entities (Sheerly Touch Ya and Shisanwu LLC) have become emblematic of the intricate symbiosis between art and fashion commerce. @sheerlytouchya @shisanwu_llc