Sarah Kanouse: My Electric Genealogy

Part storytelling, part lecture, and part live documentary film, Sarah Kanouse’s solo performance My Electric Genealogy explores the shifting cultures and politics of energy in Los Angeles through the lens of her own family. For nearly forty years, her grandfather designed, planned, and supervised the spider-vein network of lines connecting the city to its distant sources of power: rivers that are now drying up and power plants that are finally coming down. This physical infrastructure subtended diffuse “infrastructures of feeling” that included assumptions of perpetual growth and closely held beliefs about nature, gender, race, and progress. The performance weaves together signal moments in the city’s history, episodes of her grandfather’s life, anxious fantasies about a climate-challenged future, and stories of resistance and reinvention in the face of extraction.

Sarah Kanouse is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and filmmaker whose solo and collaborative work has been presented at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Documenta 13, the Museum of Contemporary Art-Chicago, The Cooper Union, The Smart Museum, and numerous film festivals, academic institutions and artist-run spaces nationwide.

My Electric Genealogy is written, produced and performed by Sarah Kanouse, with sound design by Jacob Ross, and is presented by the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture.

Admission is free. Parking for this event is free — please visit here for information.

Visitors may wish to arrive early to enjoy the exhibition States of Becoming. Regular gallery hours end at 5 p.m.

The presentation of My Electric Genealogy at CADVC is co-sponsored by the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) and the Dresher Center for the Humanities.