South Parade will present an evening of literature hosted by L.A. based Casual Encountersz, this Friday 13th October 2023.
With readings from Lucie Elven, Emma Firth, Gabriel Smith, Kei Kagirinaku, Alexis Okeowo, Rachel Connolly, hosted by Sammy Loren and Megan Nolan, within South Parade’s current exhibition Taste Maker by Ellie Pratt.
In Taste Maker, Ellie Pratt thinks about one’s own reflection in the mirror as she looks to everyday life to explore the material potential of the feminine psyche. Through playful experimentation with the painterly surface, these works deconstruct and distort the traditional depiction of the female figure in order to capture a more visceral sense of the body.
Event Details: doors 7pm, readings from 8pm. RSVP to attend via casualencountersz.com/rsvp.html or @casualencountersz
L.A. based Casual Encountersz is part of a growing DIY community of guerrilla readings across vacant spaces, living rooms and rooftops, adding a DIY frisson to nightlife; as founder Sammy Loren expresses, these are ‘readings of rage and romance.’‘Before the pandemic, Sammy Loren struggled to find a social component to his writing. “I was always envious of the way in which the art world had this built-in social life,” he said.
He’d go to readings at legacy bookshops and his eyes would roll back in his head, and then everyone would disappear right after. While living in Mexico City, he fell in with a thriving literary circuit divorced from cultural establishments, where poetry groups held court on street corners and in back alleys. Loren returned to L.A. in 2021 and hosted an ersatz dinner-party salon that spun off into Casual Encountersz, “readings of rage and romance” at his house, or anywhere really. “I always try to introduce myself to everyone that comes,” he said. The 38-year-old seized a rhythm between the “manic Gen Z voices” and his “geriatric millennial peers,” like the night he paired Jasmine Johnson’s stream-of-consciousness drug confessions with Jeffrey Deitch gallery director Melahn Frierson’s college diary sexcapades.’
exert from LA Times (2023)
Biographies
Lucie Elven is a London-based writer who has written for publications including The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Granta, Five Dials, AnOther, NOON and The Drift. THE WEAK SPOT, her first book, was published in the U.S. in 2021 by Soft Skull Press and in the UK by Prototype. She was described by Merve Emre in The New Yorker as among ‘the most interesting short-story writers working in English.’
Emma Firth is a London-based writer, editor and content consultant – currently acting associate features editor at The Evening Standard – writing for the likes of The Cut (New York Magazine), British VOGUE, ES magazine, ELLE UK, W, Rolling Stone UK, Stylist, WePresent, Service95, and more. She previously held staff roles at Financial Times, Marie Claire UK, BURO.Global and HUNGER magazine. Her work often explores the multifaceted nature of pleasure through essays, and she is the writer of the text Mirror Mirror, On the Wall for South Parade’s current exhibition Taste Maker by Ellie Pratt.
Gabriel Smith is a writer based in London. His fiction has appeared in The Drift, New York Tyrant Magazine and The Moth. His recent work Brat will now be published internationally in 2024, followed by The Complete, his second novel, based on his O. Henry Prize-winning short story of the same name.
Kei Kagirinaku is a writer currently based in London.
Alexis Okeowo is a staff writer at The New Yorker who has reported on conflict, human rights, and culture across Africa, as well as from Mexico and the American South. Their feature Tainted Earth won the Southern Environmental Law Centre’s Philip D. Reed Environmental Writing Award in 2022. Okeowo is the author of the book A Moonless, Starless Sky: Ordinary Women and Men Fighting Extremism in Africa, which received the 2018 PEN Open Book Award. Their work has also been anthologised in “The Best American Sports Writing” (2017) and “The Best American Travel Writing” (2017). Okeowo has previously contributed to the Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Financial Times. In 2020, Okeowo was named journalist of the year by the Newswomen’s Club of New York.
Rachel Connolly is a London-based writer and cultural critic from Belfast. She writes essays about societal trends, often related to technology, consumerism and the media. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, Guardian, Baffler, Financial Times, and many other publications. Rachel’s novel Lazy City is out in August 2023 in the UK and October 2023 in the U.S.
Ellie Pratt (b.1991, Kent, UK) is a painter who lives and works in London. She received a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2013 and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2015 Recent selected solo exhibitions include James Fuentes (New York, 2023) and PM/AM (London, 2021) and group exhibitions at Stems Gallery x Volery Gallery (Dubai, 2023), Particle Collection x Philips (Miami, 2022), The Artist Room Gallery x Phillips (Seoul, 2022), Lawrence Van Hagen Art, Palazzo Barbaro (Venice, 2022), Workplace (London, 2022), Linseed Projects (Shanghai, 2021) and V.O Curations (London, 2020). Pratt has previously shown with South Parade at Art Athina (Athens, 2022) and miart (Milan, 2023). southparade.biz/ellie-pratt-taste-maker
