H Leslie Foster II + Sadie Greyduck + edua mercedes

Xeno-Euphoria

April 26th - May 18th, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 26th, 7-10pm

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Xeno-Euphoria, a three-person show curated by Ashton S. Phillips, featuring fractured glass sculpture by Sadie Greyduck, surrealist drawings on black velvet by edua mercedes, and a four-channel video installation by H Leslie Foster II centering an all Black, Brown,Trans, and Nonbinary cast performing Mark Aguhar’s iconic “Litanies to My Heavenly Brown Body” as queer/trans liturgy. In the midst of a national crisis fueled by the weaponized fear of the “xeno” or alien, these artists invite us to think and feel differently about the “other” inside and outside ourselves. Conjuring ecstatic dissonance, defiant pleasure, and alien belonging, Xeno-Euphoria opens up a sensual world of fragments, speculative ritual, and sur-real possibilities that defies cis-authoritarian control.

Sadie Greyduck’s pretty and strange fragments of ruptured and unseen wholes become building blocks for new forms. A trinity of fractured votives hold the materiality of embodiment and transformation: bullets cast with raw wool and lead, oil infused with polluted rosemary, and bone fragments of bison and cow. Prismatic and legibly heterogenous, Greyduck presents a xeno-euphoric brew of threat, protection, longing, and magic.  

My euphoria is from the power of the ugly brave gnarled ecstatic bitch goddess who makes me work and teaches me about bones and beetle resin and flesh torn apart with glass.  - Sadie Greyduck

H. Leslie Foster II’s four-channel video installation “Heavenly Brown Bodies” performs Mark Aguhar’s searing poem of Brown Trans rage and benediction as queer/trans liturgy. 

FUCK YOUR WHITENESS

FUCK YOUR BEAUTY

FUCK YOUR CHEST HAIR

FUCK YOUR BEARD

FUCK YOUR PRIVILEGE

FUCK THAT YOU AREN’T MADE TO FEEL SHAME ALWAYS …

Resting in the tension between the need of oppressed peoples to name their pain and their incredible ability to celebrate their existence and dream of far better futures, Heavenly Brown Body animates Aguhar’s electrifying text through the unflinching eyes, mouths, and hands of an all Black, Brown, Trans, and Nonbinary cast. Installed in the center of Monte Vista Project’s gallery space, Foster’s installation confronts the viewer from all sides like an ecstatic tribunal of mythic xeno bodies claiming their rage and power.

Faces become xeno-landscapes and bodies become unsteady architectures in edua mercedes’ series of prismatic surrealist drawings on stretched black velvet. Multicolor caterpillars and leaking buckets of liquid gold play with mythic women bound and blindfolded inside surveillance-topped fencing. Fractured narratives and automatic symbols stretch across the walls like silky black hides reflecting and revealing inner landscapes back to the world. 

Alien among and within each other, Xeno-Euphoria builds a world of fragments, disorientation, and pleasure that defies despair and refuses cis-authoritarian control. Like McKenzie Wark’s xenoeuphoric trans raving, Xeno-Euphoria makes space for the transformation of rage into reverence, the oppressive real into the revelatory surreal, and impurity into possibility. the breaking of old forms as a pathway to new shapes and unimagined possibilities.