Please join the last opening of the summer at PMOMA w/ performances from Raul De Neives, Jason Fitz, and Keyon Gaskin.

Raúl De Nieves is a multi-media artist, performer and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by themes of excess, identity, fantasy and psychological transgression, as well as the decorative art and craft practices of his Mexican heritage, his work includes narrative painting, decadent multimedia performance (often with his band Haribo), large-scale figurative sculptures and ornamented garments.

Jason Fitz is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist whose work spans performance, installation, objects and film. Building on psychoanalytic theory and metaphysical spirituality, his work is a meditation on the human body’s experience of transformation. Using a variety of materials, Fitz plays with the power and potential that can be revealed from experimentation with identity. His alter ego, "Joy," dons long hair, wide glasses, a necklace and a silent stare. Through the Joy character, which he describes as "an expression of his inner self," Fitz interrogates the realms of self-help, subconscious identity, and the limit-less potential of the body.

Creative collaborators for over a decade, De Nieves and Fitz have summoned the androgynous, multivalent Joy persona for performances in Berlin, San Francisco and New York. Their presentation for PMOMA brings Joy to Portland with an expansive play that imagines this character as the first human being ever to exist on Earth. THE FIRST PERSON invites spectators to reflect on the joy that lives inside each of us, and the unique elation that animates body, mind and spirit when we make contact with our inner fantasies.

THE FIRST PERSON play will be performed by De Nieves and Fitz at the opening night party on August 13th at 8pm, with a complimentary performance from Keyon Gaskin. Their individual works of sculpture, paintings, costumes and silk scarves will be on display from August 13th to October 12th, 2016.