KITSCH HOUSE ARTIST STATEMENT

Kitsch House is an artistic collaboration between Pete Hickok and Jeffrey Augustine Songco. After working together as graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute, the two discovered their similar fascinations with toys, obsessive compulsion, and masculinity. Kitsch House creates cultural products that explore the liminal state between boyhood/manhood and pop-culture/fine-art. Like children at work or men at play, Kitsch House appropriates the ritualistic practices of the American male to create a new narrative for the contemporary hero.

PRE-PARTY - PROJECT DESCRIPTION

In San Francisco, there is no better place to experience the beat of pulsating nightlife than in the SOMA neighborhood. With dozens of venues to hear music of all kinds, from the tiny locals’ dive bar to the massive electronic music dance clubs that draw crowds from all over, SOMA literally contains a culture of movers and shakers at night.

For Pre-Party, Kitsch House will create an installation inside SOMArts that highlights SOMA’s nightlife culture. The installation will serve as a performative space dedicated to the party before the party. When Hickok and Songco were just little boys in the ‘80s, famed performance artist and club promoter, Leigh Bowery, was already turning the ritual of getting ready into an art form. Stemming from such artistic interpretations of  nightlife, celebrity and the party, guests will join the artists on scheduled evenings during the exhibition to get ready before going out to various clubs in SOMA. By using elements like dance music, mirrors, mood lighting, costume and beverages, SOMArts visitors who participate with Pre-Party will be preparing for their inclusion within the nightlife community of SOMA, while also creating a micro-community by making getting ready together into an art in and of itself.

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