Round 23, 3 Scenes from Queer Utopia by Andie Flores and Sam Mayer
November 16, 2024 – March 2, 2025
For us, the cage is a place to perform. We turned the cage into a theater. Two curtains are suspended inside. One protected and one exposed. In our own way, we are both interested in the gap between performing and being, fiction and autobiography. This is our first time working together like this, and we had no idea what it was going to be like. 3 scenes from Queer Utopia was born from our desire to envision a better world, while embracing the tensions between our fundamental worldviews. Sam is a cynic, Andie chooses hope. But we both believe a better world is possible. So we hired artists Venese Alcantar and Grant Gilker to play us in a performance about the artists’ role in making the world a better place. The performance took place inside the cage. We sat outside the cage and directed them on how to be us. What art do you choose to make when you know art won’t save the world?
Andie Flores is a performance artist in Austin, Texas, who uses embarrassment as a medium for investigating hyper, almost obsessive, visibility in a racialized body across barriers of border, history, and capital. Her work has been shown at Bushwig, Presa House Gallery, The Museum of Human Achievement, Ivester Contemporary, MASS Gallery, Future Front, Contrast Film Festival, Fusebox Festival, and The Dallas Latino Cultural Center. In the summer of 2024, Andie was an international artist-in-residence at Warehouse9 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Sam Mayer is a playwright from Houston. Full length: POOLBOY00 (Museum of Human Achievement; Beaubourg; Co-Lab Projects; UT Austin), THE CUCK (Intramural Theater), and CHET’S SUMMER VACATION (Kennedy Center; Intramural Theater; Rec Room Arts). His work has been developed with The Orchard Project, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, The Workshop Theater, The Mastheads, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. He is the recipient of the Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation Prize. MFA: Michener Center for Writers.
Round 24, Ritualware by Ariana Kimball
August 2, 2025 – September 6, 2025
Round 24: Ritualware brings together both elemental and domestic objects inside the cage. These objects wait with quiet purpose. Hydroponic cells sustain living plants, each one rooted in handcrafted net pots. Chiseled tree stumps offer surfaces to gather water, hold a cup, or mark a moment. The sandy installation draws from Kimball’s concept of “Re- and Pre-Setting,” a practice of regeneration as a cyclical act. Her work frames care not as something to complete, but as a state to return to, again and again. By using natural materials and embracing a domestic aesthetic, Kimball challenges the logic of excess. Her restrained, grounded approach suggests that presence, not accumulation, is the true measure of value, redefining materialism through acts of mindfulness and attention.
Ariana Kimball is an Austin-based artist whose work explores care, routine, and the quiet labor of keeping things alive, both physically and emotionally. Kimball’s work explores the quiet persistence of rituals through materials and sculptural forms. She traces how small, repeated gestures such as cleaning, resetting, and tending become anchors of meaning and modes of presence.
Round 25, A Body Without Organs by Javier Robelo
11/15/2025 – January 2026
Opening Reception – Saturday, November 15th, 5-8 pm
Performance Part 1: November 7th , 7:30 pm
Performance Part 2: November 15th, 6pm
Performance Part 3: January 10th, time tbd
Round 25: A Body Without Organs reimagines the cage as a living organism, animated through playful interactions between people, objects, and landscape. Acts of touching, ripping, tying, making, and unmaking transform everyday materials: bedsheets become flesh, ropes turn into guts, and plastic and wooden bones weave in and out of the rigid gridded metal form. Robelo investigates the porous boundaries between self and other, how our surroundings impress upon us, and how we, in turn, ooze back into them.
The cartoon body, with its ability to stretch, contort, pull apart, and come back together, serves as a metaphor for queer being. It imagines a self that bends, breaks, melts into others, and extends into the world through continual transformation. Performers will activate the installation as a labyrinthine playground, collaboratively reflecting on the fluid nature of being, within and beyond the limits of the body.
Performances organized in collaboration with Leo Briggs, featuring Venese Alcantar, Angel Blanco, and Katherine Vaughn.
Javier Robelo, from Managua, Nicaragua, uses sculpture and performance to explore queer identity and experience. Working with paper-mâché, fabric, and tape, he creates forms that look both familiar and strange, inviting people to touch, dance with, and pull them apart. These works come to life through interaction, turning into collaborators in participatory events that question social norms and highlight the possibilities of change. By working closely with others and with materials, Javier looks for beauty in what is overlooked and freedom in the feeling of not belonging.
Javier received a BA from Williams College and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. His work has been exhibited at the Williams College Museum of Art, the Joseph Gross Gallery at the University of Arizona (Phoenix, AZ), the Visual Arts Center, Ivester Contemporary, and the Cohen New Works Festival (Austin, TX). He currently makes, teaches, and performs in Austin, Texas.
Round 25: A Body Without Organs by Javier Robelo is presented as part of Cage Match Project’s 2025 Input/Output (I/O) Residency, a program dedicated to supporting emerging artists working in installation and spatial storytelling. This project is supported in part by the City of Austin Economic Development Department. Stay tuned for the next application cycle. The program is open to recent graduates and upper-level undergraduates in Central Texas, with a focus on supporting Queer, BIPOC, gender-nonconforming, and female artists. Learn more and apply through the “Open Calls” tab on our website available in english y en español.