Commonwealth and Council presents Mutant Salon: Exorcises, an immersive installation incorporating participatory sculpture, sound, video, and performance.

In this exhibition, Mutant Salon presents an arena of sound-enabled beauty tools, vessels, and custom cosmetics that trigger a composition of aural effects and affective encounters with fluid corporeal forms, materializing gestures of transformation. Integrated in the exhibition: an intimate self-haircutting guided meditation; participatory makeovers; exercise/exorcise sculptures and a video that pushes non-conforming bodies to a potentially unobtainable, convulsive limit, and asses pumped to explosion.

Nurturing a vision of collective world-making, Mutant Salon: Exorcises additionally features collaborations with members of its community, which includes Kelly Akashi, Jacinto Astiazarán, Lindsay August-Salazar, Experimental Half Hour (Eva Aguila and Brock Fansler), Elisa Harkins, laub, Maxilla, Evan McCune, Jennifer Moon, Tyler Matthew Oyer, Project Rage Queen (Dalton Chase, Alice Cunt, Travis R-D, Isaac Ledesma, Vik Victorious), and Martyna Szczesna.

Founded by Young Joon Kwak in 2012, Mutant Salon is a beauty salon, art studio, and platform for collaborative performance that takes place in various venues such as REDCAT, Honor Fraser Gallery, CalArts, and Southern Exposure (San Francisco). In addition to offering haircuts, psychic readings, makeup, bespoke nails, tattoos, and other treatments, Mutant Salon embraces a continual metamorphosis of itself with each iteration to offer new aesthetic experiences and experimental modes of performative engagement. At its core, Mutant Salon strives to foster connections between queer, trans, women, people of color, and mutant communities to celebrate an ethos of transformation and critical togetherness in the act of self care. Mutant Salon’s current core members also include Marvin Astorga and Alli Miller.