TransVengence | Aza Greenlee, Noa/Nomi Micaela Fields, and Ava Mirage Wanbli on June 20th

Noa Micaela (Nomi) Fields is an echodeviant* (*trans poets with hearing aids) in search of transversal wildness in her one and only captionless life. Find her poems and other writing in Tripwire, Anomaly, Zoeglossia, Elderly, Tyger Quarterly, and Sixty Inches From Center. She is a programming curator at the Poetry Foundation and a 2022 Fellow at Disability Lead and Zoeglossia. 

Aza Greenlee is a body artist and co-conspirator at No Nation Tangential Unspace Art Lab. This coalescence is one to galavant in dreamscapes, ancestral juke joints, chaturbate masturbation web temples, loose-tooth tanks, and The Heartspace. They organize “Smudge Cinema Project”, a now-and-then-wait-when? screening series that takes a look at what happens when a film is projected on a wall for people to watch. Metabolization seems to be what they appear to do, lately.

Ava Mirage Wanbli is a New Media artist and performer based in Chicago, IL. Her work operates in a multitude of formats, mediums, and presentations of persona to build engagement through virtual and physical aspects of virtual world construction. Ava utilizes video game engines, live performance, installations, sculptures, video, and body to process components of the self through modalities of becoming. She investigates aspects of performing for the camera, mirrors, and virtual reconstructions of the body through 3D scanning, avatar creation, and virtual environment building as a means to craft a voice that speaks towards collapsed temporalities, archiving the body, as well as potentials of future self. Much of Ava’s work is also in conversation with aspects of fetishization of the consumed body through media depictions and how persona is framed through technology. In her primary approaches, she aims to confront the voyeur as well as communicate the complexities of trans narratives through hyper-sexualized imagery and performance.

Ava received her Masters Degree in Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. Alongside her art practice and community engagement, she has been an educator at multiple art institutions for the last 4 years. She is a recipient of 3Arts New Wave Artists Award, and has been a resident of ACRE Artist residency as well as New Art City Residency. Her most current work has shown at Roots and Culture Contemporary Art Gallery in Chicago and is now being shown in a 6 month solo exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Wanbli has also been published in Tone Magazine as well as curated events at Mana Contemporary in Chicago. Ava continues to organize and build spaces to further her commitment to the conversations around her transwoman body and the voice that it can hold to educate, uplift, and complicate narratives around selfhood through hyper-visibility and fetishization.