Photo by Ryan Pfluger
Jibz Cameron (she/her) is a performance and video artist living in Los Angeles, performing multimedia work as alter ego Dynasty Handbag. Over the last 20 years, Cameron has combined tragedy and comedy, at such institutions as MOCA, PS1, Joe’s Pub, The Kitchen, REDCAT, The Broad Museum, The Hammer Museum, and the New Museum, among others. The New York Times has heralded her as “the funniest and most pitch perfect performance seen in years,” and New York Magazine has called her “outrageously smart, grotesque and innovative.” Cameron has written and produced seven evening-length performance pieces and countless short works that have been performed in clubs and venues internationally. She also has produced multiple video works and 3 albums of original music. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2020 Creative Capital Awardee and a 2021 United States Artist. Her film Weirdo Night, made with director Mariah Garnett is an official Sundance Film Festival 2021 submission. Cameron also produces and hosts Weirdo Night!, a monthly experimental comedy and performance event in Los Angeles + New York. Jibz is honored to be included in 2023’s Made In LA Biannale “Acts Of Living” at the Hammer Museum.
Mariah Garnett (she/her) mixes documentary, narrative, and experimental filmmaking practices to make work that accesses existing people and communities beyond her immediate experience. Her films deconstruct the conventional hierarchy between filmmaker and subject, a mode that has historically been the purview of directors who possess economic, racial, and gender privilege. By including her own image, Garnett positions queerness in relation to subject matter that, on the surface, may seem disconnected from LGBT identity. The works simultaneously acknowledge a natural human desire for contact with others and the legacies of abuse and “othering” that have surrounded the mediation of that desire through history. In this way, Garnett creates a space in her films where more than one thing can be true.
Garnett is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video and holds an MFA from Calarts and a BA from Brown University. Recent solo exhibitions include Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Commonwealth + Council, a 10 year survey of her work at the LA Municipal Art Gallery, and Sundance Film Festival, 2021. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Bomb among others and has screened and exhibited internationally at The New Museum, Brooklyn Academy Of Music (BAM), REDCAT, Made in LA (Hammer Museum Biennial), The Metropolitan Arts Centre (Tate Belfast), CPH:DOX, Hot Docs, NY Film Festival, and BFI London. She is an Assistant Professor of Media at UC San Diego, and lives and works in Los Angeles.
