HORROR, EROTICA AND DEATH AT THE UDC with Cara Bendetto

HORROR, EROTICA AND DEATH AT THE UDC with CARA BENEDETTO
Join us in the ICA Shop+Cafe for an intimate reading with artist Cara Benedetto as she reads from her upcoming novel, Mask of the Red Death at UDC. The reading will be followed by a conversation about the rom-com as it relates to methods of oppression in literature, film and television. Cara will be joined in discussion by J Molina Garcia, VCU Assistant Professor in Photography & Film, Pia Bakala, VCU MFA candidate in Painting & Printmaking, and Sandy Zohore, VCU Assistant Professor in Painting & Printmaking. Cara Bendetto is an Associate Professor of Painting & Printmaking as well as an artist and writer who has previously published her experimental erotic novels through Paul Chan’s Badlands Unlimited. Paul Chan: Breathers is on view at ICA VCU til Jan. 07.

About Badlands Unlimited:

Founded in 2010 by Paul Chan, Badlands Unlimited makes and publishes books paperbacks, e-books, digital group exhibitions, and other various media. Badlands published and produced works by artists and writers that exemplify the dissolution between the distinction of books, files, and artworks. Select publications from Badlands Unlimited will be available in the ICA shop as well as online during the duration of our Fall exhibition, “Paul Chan: Breathers”. Click the link in bio to shop our new arrivals.

About the artists:

Pia Bakala(b.1991) is a Richmond, VA based painter who was born in Aurora, Illinois. She
received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the Kansas
City Art Institute in 2013. She is currently a 2024 MFA Candidate at Virginia Commonwealth
University’s Department of Painting and Printmaking. Influenced by her personal experiences as
a transgender woman, Bakala creates painterly expressions of everyday internal conflicts. In
doing so, she examines various cultural preconceptions of trans-femininity, expressions of
sexuality, and binaries of nature and artifice.

J. Molina-Garcia (she/they) is a Salvadoran-American media artist, writer, and educator. A citizen of the Global South and an American Dreamer, J’s work draws on the politics of immigration, philosophies of madness, and nonwestern esoteric traditions to critique the violence of the Global North.

Monsieur Zohore (b. 1993, Potomac, MD) is the Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. Through performance, video, installation, and sculpture, his practices explore queer history alongside his Ivorian-American heritage through a multi-faceted lens of humor, economics, art history, and labor. Monsieur Zohore received an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020 and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York in 2015. Monsieur Zohore’s work is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (promised gift); The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, amongst others. Monsieur Zohore lives and works between Richmond, VA, New York, NY, and Abidjan, CIV.

Cara Benedetto is an artist and writer. Benedetto renovates forms in popular culture through critique and affect such as the American romance industry, pedagogy as big business, and the weaponization of language in ad culture. She is the author of four experimental erotic novels, Mask of the Red Death at UDC (forthcoming), Origin of Love and Other Tales of Degradation (2020), The Coming of Age (2015) and Burning Blue (2015), and the editor of Contemporary Print Handbook (2015). Her work has been shown in and with the people and places she loves.