 Los Angeles Art Association presents Second Skin: a powerful one-night only performance art event featuring Kristine Schomaker, Denise Siegel, Elizabeth Tobias and Marjan Vayghan. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." In today's society it is the media and advertising that offer promises of love, happiness, success and freedom through an unattainable ideal. In Kristine Schomaker's performance for Second Skin, she will use the virtual world of Second Life as a platform for activism. Artist, performer and writer Denise Siegel performance explores how the mind reconciles disparate political, scientific, and religious ideologies, and the reasons we refuse to examine the foundational concepts that create these internal conflicts. Elizabeth Tobias' Second Skin piece invites our shadow selves to be seen in public with the notion that destroying inhibition and self-protection will make way for more authentic experiences. Effigies are crudely made depictions of individuals used both as devotional objects or objects of destruction. When destroyed, effigies are thought to banish undesirable elements or spirits from our lives. Marjan Vayghan's Second Skin performance is going to take the shape of long black, lace, head dresses, which will be placed on pedestals. The artist will bring awareness to the mournful skin of funeral processions that have plagued families and communities in Iran and throughout the Arab Spring. As governments will to hold on to allusions of power translate into ongoing genocides across the Middle East, families of those who are killed wear their sorrow as a second skin and hold funeral processions throughout the streets fearless of their illegal funerals held. When: Saturday, August 18, 6-9pm Admission: Free Where: Gallery 825 - 825 North La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90069 For more information call 310.652.8272 or e-mail gallery825@laaa.org. | 
