Invitation-Only Performance and Video

Live and taped performances about registry laws and related restrictions that you have to be invited to see

2015–present

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LJ Reynolds Reads the Sex Offender Registry

Public registries, intended to provide useful information to the public, are bureaucratically cryptic. In the spirit of Paper Tiger Television’s Brian Winston Reads the News and Martha Rosler Reads Vogue —both seminal video works that taught audiences to deconstruct the conventions of those unique media institutions in setting ideological agendas—I perform invitation-only “readings” of public conviction registries, the criminal code, proposed legislation, and news coverage about people labeled sex offenders. These site-specific performances range from minutes to hours in living rooms, classrooms, and occassionally embedded in a public talk.

To take advantage of the intimate and local phenomenon of looking at a registry website for people in your neighborhood, I started doing a series of presentations at people’s homes for us to look at their neighborhood together. This series also includes:

LJ Reynolds Reads the Arson, VOYRA and Meth Registries
LJ Reynolds Reads the Illinois Criminal Code
LJ Reynolds Reads Proposed Bills Before the House Judiciary Committee

The use of state labels such as “sex offender,” “murderer” or “sexual predator,” along with the use of mugshots, ensure an uncritical experience of fear, hatred, and disgust. But encouraging people to spend time with the images of people who are most demonized, and to learn some of the lingo from this state database, reveals some of the extreme policies embedded in it.

In sorting the list by “homeless sex offenders,” I frequently saw the images of these individuals most often, and started giving presentations about them. In seeing their photographs get updated by police, and sometimes seeing new convictions for administrative violations of complex registry laws, I extrapolated more information about their experiences. This one-way acquaintance with them through the website is what lead me to seek out, in real life, people who have to register who are experiencing homelessness, which is the premise of the current Chicago 400 campaign.

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LJ Reynolds Reads the News About Sex Offenders

News coverage about people on the registry often targets people with administrative violations of complex restrictions. Understanding their significance and their connection to homelessness, requires context. The official terms “predator,” “absconder,” and “non-compliant” are sensational but not informative. Other news reports are simply alerts about homeless people in general, or people who are employees doing their jobs, and then a news team discovers they are on the registry.

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Starbucks Sex Offender Sleep Apnea Comedy Showcase

This live comedy showcase destabilizes the ascriptive category “sex offender” while deconstructing another recent medical identity, the “sleep apnea sufferer.” Both of these new historical subjects, also struggling comics, use short-form story-telling to detail, with humility and optimism, the catastrophes of respectability and masculinity that arise from their new material and existential conditions.

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