Noa Fields aka Nomi - photo by Mariposa Divina
Regina Martinez
girly***
relaxxX
Like an ecstatic game of telephone gone haywire, Noa Micaela Fields’ debut book E (Nightboat Books) practices mishearing as a glitchy hormonal transition of language. Join us for the book launch ritual of enjambment as embodiment as escape art: an evening of ethereal remixes, multimedia performances by collaborators, and euphoric dancing in the naughty clairvoyant loading zone.
Regina Martinez sets the tone during a selective listening hour, followed by live performances by Maya Nguyen, Ruby Que, Noa Micaela Fields, and Barbiefoot. Stick around for a dance party with DJs girly*** and relaxxX. As Vaginal Davis decrees, “E is for epic!”
7PM DOORS / 8PM PERFORMANCES / 10PM DANCE PARTY
$15 / $10 w/ Student ID - Tickets Available at the Door.
Access notes: There will be ASL interpretation. Please note Elastic Arts is a second floor walkup and is not wheelchair accessible.
Artist Bios
Barbiefoot is a cohort of artists and musicians creating live audio-visual performances that respond to the lived experience of being queer/trans in America. Composed of visual and sound artist Eden Yono, ambient tape improviser MahNu, and violinist and singer Johanna Brock, Barbiefoot's performance environments evoke ambient soundscapes, harsh noise crash outs, and the electric pulse of the dancefloor through performance art, video, and movement.
girly*** is a DJ and performance alias born and currently based in Chicago. Bass, vocal samples, synths, vinyl and community allow girly*** to bend time and bridge gaps between genres bred in the Midwest, Baltimore, UK, the Tri-State area and cyberspace. Listeners should expect the unexpected from a girly*** set. Every blend may not be perfect but every blend will be poetic. SmartBar, Hidden Ideas, Smoke & Mirrors, Podlasie Club and Miyagi Records are a few places girly*** has been witnessed.
Maya Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Russian artist with a focus on sound performance and diasporic making. She gathers speech fragments, urban recordings, body movements, migratory routes, sounds imitating nature sounds, and videos of daily life into open-ended works. Nguyen is the Karl Sczuka Radio Art Research Prize 2024 awardee (SWR/Goethe Institute), Arts Club of Chicago Fellow 2025-26, and recent artist-resident at Saari Residency (Mynämäki, FI 2025) and Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin 2023). Her work traverses galleries, museums, festivals, and sound venues, notably Vincom Center for Contemporary Art (Hanoi), UCLA New Wight Gallery (Los Angeles), Manzi Art Space (Hanoi), World Forum For Acoustic Ecology 2023 (Florida), Internationales Digitalkunst Festival 2022 (Stuttgart), Jack Straw New Media Gallery (Seattle), and elsewhere. Nguyen holds degrees from the University of Chicago and School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Noa Micaela Fields aka Nomi is an echodeviant enjambment queen (translation: trans poet with hearing aids). Her debut collection E is out from Nightboat Books. You can also find her writing in Anomaly, Sixty Inches From Center, Tripwire, Tyger Quarterly, and Zoeglossia, among other places. She lives in Chicago, where she curates readings at the Poetry Foundation, edits for trans youth literary magazine Chrysalis, and disemvowels on the dance floor. doyounoapoet.com
Regina Martinez experiences sound as records of our connections and departures. Her current experiments draw from an archive of infinitely personal recordings she relates to as soundmarks: her father's hands cleaning dried beans, the flap of our clothes outside on the line, the creak of the front gate to home. Each moment becomes its own instrument, its own layer of composition, and a washing and wringing out of memory meant to be overheard like a poem again and again. Often under the alias, selective listening, her work evolves through vinyl dj sets, live performance and sound design for film and movement. She's part of the family at 606 Records. She produces the radio show alluvia's fluid for Chicago Public Media Institute's Lumpen Radio. selectivelistening.site
relaxxX is a Chicago-based producer who specializes in dance music informed by a rich variety of global club styles. soundcloud.com/take_deep_breaths
Ruby Que is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on site-specific interventions and expanded cinema performance. They work with light to open portals and create hauntings. Drawing from their lived experience as a queer, itinerant immigrant, they meditate on yearning and find belonging in transit. Their work has been supported by Luminarts Cultural Foundation, ACRE, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, New Media Caucus, Roman Susan and Chicago Artists Coalition. Que holds a BA from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they currently teach.