Goddesses and MonstersArt in Odd Places 2025: VOICE

Goddesses and Monsters

Art in Odd Places 2025: VOICE

July 25–27, 2025West Hollywood, California

In July 2025, the Association of Hysteric Curators participated in Art in Odd Places (AiOP) 2025: VOICE, a citywide performance art festival presented by the City of West Hollywood and curated by Deborah Oliver. The festival brought 35 artist projects into public space throughout West Hollywood over three days.

AHC presented Goddesses and Monsters: A Racket of Banshees, a multi-day series of performances exploring divinity, monstrosity, ritual, resistance, ecological crisis, and feminist transformation.

Drawing from ancestral archetypes and radical imagination, the project asked: What must we invoke, and what must we let die? What truths lie hidden in the monsters we have been taught to fear, and what futures can we build if we follow their call?

Across the three-day festival, a rotating constellation of AHC artists transformed public space through participatory ritual, sound, installation, embodiment, and experimental performance.

Maya Mackrandilal, embodying the goddess Lakshmi in Ritual for the Future, created a meditative performance channeling ancestral wisdom to transmute grief into hope. Confronting ecological and social collapse and maternal rage, the work invited audiences into a space of mourning, imagination, and collective renewal.

Taryn Lee’s Tenuous Breath created a meditative, participatory installation of “bubble trees” holding collective hopes and worries.

In Monet Clark’s The Creature in the Time of the Narwhal, Clark transformed B-movie tropes into an eco-feminist ritual, using animal shapeshifting to confront internalized and national misogyny.

Mary Anna Pomonis’ A Pussy Cat Chorus created a sonic ritual of collective healing using cat purring and protest sounds in response to the political environment of 2025.

Marjan K. Vayghan’s Mothers of Matter: A Global Canvas was a durational, site-based ritual in which pigment, prayer, poetry, earth, memory, and movement converged. Honoring matriarchal lineages and global struggle, the canvas became both altar and bridge between exile and belonging.

Michiko Yao’s That’s Just How I Express My Love (Jenny series) used text drawn from the anime theme song Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan in a provocative intervention exploring fetishism, violence, and femininity.

Together, the performances formed a living, shifting pantheon in the streets of West Hollywood. The monstrous became divine, the goddess became guide, and public space became a site for ritual, disruption, exchange, and collective imagination.

From Goddesses and Monsters to A Racket of Banshees

The West Hollywood performances became an important part of the continuing evolution of AHC’s Goddesses and Monsters project.

The project began with the 2023 online exhibition Goddesses and Monsters with LADIES’ ROOM and subsequently expanded across exhibitions, works on paper, performance, video, and public interventions.

In 2026, this ongoing project developed into the multi-venue exhibition A Racket of Banshees: Goddesses and Monsters Re-Imagined at the Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art and Los Angeles Valley College Art Gallery.

At LAVC, the history of the performance project returns to the gallery through performance objects and documentation from Art in Odd Places VOICE/WEHO, alongside the traveling works-on-paper exhibition and a video installation of Scarlett Kim’s BEASTS. AHC members will also activate the exhibition through new live performances at both the opening reception on September 15 and the closing Performance Art Festival on October 17, 2026.

In this way, Goddesses and Monsters continues to change form as it moves between digital space, museums, galleries, and the street. Rather than functioning as a single exhibition, it has become an evolving collective project through which AHC artists continue to ask how mythology, monstrosity, ritual, and feminist imagination can help us envision other ways of being.

Goddesses and Monsters: A Racket of Banshees was presented as part of The City of West Hollywood presents Art in Odd Places 2025: VOICE – West Hollywood.

Curator: Deborah OliverProducer: Robin ShatellAssociate Producer: Katya UsvitskyCuratorial Assistant: Kaia Love King-HallFounder/Director: Ed Woodham

Art in Odd Places presents visual and performance art in public spaces and has been active in New York City since 2005, with projects extending its investigation of public space, civic engagement, and artistic intervention nationally and internationally.