SNAKEBITE is a pop-up creation-space located in downtown Tucson dedicated to experimentation in performance, installation, and time-based practices. Organized by artists Geneva Foster Gluck and Racheal Rios the mission of the temporary venue is to extend space to artists to encompass experimental curation and new works in performance, installation and time-based projects.

SNAKEBITE is located at 174 East Tool Ave.

For more information, please find us @this_snake_bite // Email: sugarbeastcircus@gmail.com //

Current Show:

SNAKEBITE Presents: Tactile Cosmology: daddy issues Vol. 1. New works by Amber Doe

On display from September 7th-21st.  Opening reception 6-8pm Saturday the7th 

Tactile Cosmology prioritizes the black femme experience—its histories, futures, and creative expressions—interstices of grief and trauma.  Grief and trauma are experiences that must be witnessed to be understood and therefore healed. A place to question the gendering of the earth as feminine in relation to ongoing violent extraction. 

It’s a space for futures created by systems of care acknowledging creation and possibility are generated by black feminism and Afro futurism. The personal is universal exploring the history of geology and paleontological sciences through my own relationship to my father via colonial postcards and the never-ending colossus of white supremacist capitalism.

 Utilizing the space and production support of Snakebite Creation Space, the elements of this show come together for the first time; integrating years of research. Tactile Cosmology was created with the generous support of Photographer Alanna Airtram, an ASU Projecting All Voices Fellowship (funded by the Mellon Foundation), a MOCA Night Bloom Grant, and the Arizona Commission of the Arts. Join us for an artist talk with Amber and Alanna on September 21st at 11 a.m.; coffee and pastries will be available.

Past Shows:

SNAKEBITE Presents: The Resistance of the Echo & La Eco Resistencia. A sound and object installation by Francisco Eme

 Opening reception 6pm - 9pm, Saturday May 11th

During the pandemic, artist Francisco Eme turned his attention to the canyon behind his home in San Diego. He removed the invasive plants and nurtured the growth of indigenous species; he observed the flora and fauna, listened to the calls of coyotes and birds, and recorded their comings and goings. Over the past five years, Francisco has taken hundreds of photographs, videos, and audio recordings of the canyon. He has collected objects—organic and man-made—and created others. These documents, artifacts, and soundscapes are the foundational materials for the artworks in the exhibition.

The Resistance of Echo & La Eco-Resistencia is inspired by this experience, taking the form of a contemplative multimedia art project and an urban ecology study focusing on the biological dynamics of a canyon situated in a suburb of San Diego. The project connects us with the activity in the canyon as it resists “guerrilla style” against the monstrosity of urbanization, against human intervention. The artistic process also highlights the spiritual connection between a human and a small oasis of wildlife and is a call for acts of eco-resistance framed by questions of identity, border consciousness, and cultural transformation.

Francisco Eme (1981) CDMX-OAX currently lives and works in San Diego, CA., where he is Arts & Culture Director at Casa Familiar and Gallery Director at The FRONT Arte & Cultura, a trans-border art gallery in San Diego, US / Tijuana, MX, and was awarded a San Diego Art Prize in 2024. His practice is driven by a deep observation of the culture in which he lives, from personal, social, and everyday situations. “I strive to start a conversation with the audience about our culture, our family, nature, memory, and other preoccupations of our time and place. Art, society, technology, and science merge in my practice. My works come out in the shape of a music composition, multimedia installations, photography, but most importantly, as ideas.”

On display from May 11- June 1. Gallery hours announced @this_snake_bite

Special thanks to Downtown Tucson For Everyone Grant and the Downtown Social Justice Committee whose support made this show possible.

SNAKEBITE Presents: La Series de Intimidad.

New photographic works by Miro Gutierrez with Soundtrack by Ren Petersavage

 On display from April 6th – 20th. Opening reception 6pm - 9pm, Saturday April 6th

La Series de Intimidad is a new body of work created by Miro Gutierrez that combines tin-type photography, sound design, and the material staging of studio photography to explore the queer bodies and spaces that were left out of traditional early portraiture. The images convey that, though these identities may not have been represented in the socially conservative times in which this photographic technology emerged, they have always been here, challenging the status quo and holding space for glitch, chance, and connectivity.

 Gutierrez creates striking portraits by utilizing experimentation, process, and trial and error. Rather than keeping the messy and often frustrating process of working with an antiquated photographic technique hidden, he offers viewers an opportunity to observe the artistic process as one that is more organic than controlled.

 While at Snakebite, La Series de Intimidad includes a unique soundtrack composed by Ren Petersavage as well as two WTF (Woman, Trans, Femme) life drawing sessions. Gutierrez will use these live encounters to encourage participants to explore looking at their own surroundings as sources of inspiration, as well as demonstrating creative ways to show what different eyes see.

SNAKEBITE Presents: Slow Bloom. New works by Yu Yu Shiratori.

On display from March 2nd – 16th.

Opening reception 6pm - 9pm, Saturday March 2.

Slow Bloom is the first large scale installation by multi-disciplinary artist, Yu Yu Shiratori. Featuring culturally significant objects, contradictory materials, and larger than life proportions, Shiratori’s work travels through personal narratives set against the backdrop of the Sonoran Desert.

Shiratori leverages resilience and fortitude in creating this work, and her installation utilizes delicate and functional objects as stand-ins for durable objects that resist decay and disappearance, evoking qualities of strength and power. This playful subversion reflects on the parallel ways characteristics are built within individuals through experiences of cultural code switching, and other learned behaviors of navigating space.

Slow Bloom expands the familiar, stretching objects beyond their physical form through light and shadow. This visual metaphor illuminates the unseen forces that shape our lives. Ancestral wisdom, shared identity, and individual insights—all blend together, telling the story of our interconnected communities and the futures we collectively create.

Snakebite Presents: Performing Objects.

A group Show. Opening Celebration, Saturday February 3rd, 6-8pm.

In this group show, we bring together the work of three artists to consider the relationships between performance, in its many forms, and the objects, documents, and artifacts that accompany performative acts.

The scholar Diane Taylor proposes the concept of “Archive and Repertoire” as a way to frame the interconnected relationship between the live event and the objects, materials, and documentation that surround performance, including social interventions, protests, and performances that go unseen. Performing Objects highlights the connections between making, performances-of-the-everyday, and the way knowledge or knowing is communicated through tactile encounters.

Stitched Maps by Ruxandra Guidi. Ruxandra is a writer and storyteller whose practice extends to stitched map-making. These sewn objects are abstractly narrative, relating to her writing on the waterways of the Americas, among other things. As Performative Objects, the Stitched Maps represent the relationship between performance-of-the-everyday, generational embodied practices, and the non-verbal yet narrative relationship that comes to reside in the objects of creative labor.

Prayer Ties by Magda Mankel. Magda is an artist and scholar whose work focuses on immigration, heritage, and border justice along the US-Mexico border. Magda learned the process of making prayer ties through her collaborative ethnographic research with the organizers of the Migrant Trail Walk– a 75-mile walk between Sasabe, Sonora and Tucson, Arizona that bears witness to the deaths of migrants in the Sonoran Desert. As meditative objects, prayer ties are created through collective grieving activities and site-specific encounters that materialize and mobilize cultural repertoires. As Performative Objects, Magda’s Prayer Ties are animated by intention, medicine, prayer, and other states of presence. Functioning in multiple ways, Prayer Ties allows us to publicly and privately grieve while also archiving/recognizing/documenting the deadly impacts of prevention through deterrence policies and border militarization

Miyeokguk Project by Jisun Myung. Jisun is a theater director, facilitator, and musician. Her Miyeokguk Project is a multi-sensory installation and performance centering Korean women's diaspora’s voices/stories on reproduction. The work takes the form of video, object installations, and a 45-minute multimedia performance. As Performative Objects, Jisun’s work blurs the distinction between theatrical prop and everyday objects. The work also traces the connections between the role of food and the act of cooking as a form of cultural performance, as a ritual of caring for one another, and the expectations of the reproducing body.

SNAKEBITE Presents: Look with the Eyes of the Animal.

New works by J. Frankie McCourt. On display from November 4th-25th.

Look with the Eyes of the Animal was born out of a need to investigate the interior landscape of the self and the psyche. The animal within carries an ancient wildness, an intuitiveness often forgotten amid the chains and cages of the greater human-made world. To look with the eyes of the animal is to acknowledge deeper truths, scars, predators, and prey within. To look with the eyes of the animal is to become acquainted with one's intuitive nature and solidify the bond to cosmic beginning and ancestral knowledge.

J. Frankie McCourt is a visual artist, primarily working in the medium of cut paper. For her show at Snakebite Creation Space McCourt considers her meticulous craft as a mediative state to explore the self through allegorical imagery involving flora and fauna. This body of work attempts to traverse this interior landscape and relay what is found through visual storytelling.

SNAKEBITE Presents: Trashy Wonderland a collection of works by artist and musician Ryan Dobrowski.

On display from May 6th-27th. Opening reception 6pm - 9pm, Saturday May 6th.

I moved to Tucson about a year and a half ago. I am originally from Oregon where I went to the University of Oregon and received my BFA with a focus in painting. For the past fifteen years I have been a touring musician but have always returned to painting when I’m not on the road. For this show I decided to put away the brush and canvas and turned toward discarded cardboard boxes either pulled from my own recycling bin or just found on the street. Working with wax pastels and colored pencils the goal was to produce many drawings to create a landscape installation of sorts. Some are funny, some are sweet, some are kind of sad, but I enjoyed making every one of them. Through working on the often rough and non-rectangular cardboard I started gravitating toward other objects that had been discarded which led to more sculptural pieces. I began seeing the trash on streets and in the river as potential instead of human failure. 

SNAKEBITE Presents: You've Made This House Your Home.

collection of works by artist Elizabeth Denneau.

On display from April 1-22nd. Opening reception 6-9pm, Saturday April 1st.

SNAKEBITE Presents: *This Residency

*This is a visual-dance collaboration between Geneva Foster Gluck and Racheal Rios. We are giving ourselves a residency in our space to apply for grants, be weird, move our bodies and explore imagery and props for a new work.

SNAKEBITE Presents SAFE PLACE an interactive installation by photographer Shannon Smith. On display from November 4-19th, 2022. Opening reception Friday, November 4th, 6pm-9pm.

Shannon Smith moved to Tucson to attend graduate school at the University of Arizona. While there, she birthed two children and a LOVE for the magic of the desert she would now call her home. After earning her MFA in Photography, she set out on the journey of learning to be a mother while working as an artist, teacher, and the many other roles in her life.

SAFE PLACE is Smith’s first site specific installation, which incorporates elements such as nature, magic, personal healing and community. She is mainly focused on the world each visitor will contribute to creating within the space.

Her work has been shown nationally at the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IA., The Center forFine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO., Shemer Art Center, Phoenix, AZ., Midwest Center for Photography, Wichita, KS., Darkroom Gallery, Essex Jct. VT., Elder Gallery, Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, NE., Marion Center for Photographic Arts, Santa Fe, NM., and the Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ. to name just a few. She completed a series of portraits for the Cushing Street Skatepark which she installed last August under the Cushing Street bridge at I-10. This project stemmed from a life-long love for skateboarding, her son, and the skateboarding community here in Tucson. To find out more about the project you can visit: https://www.insideoutproject.net/en/explore/group-action/tucson-skatepark-alliance-cushing-street-skatepark-project.

SNAKEBITE Present Nervous Conditions; bloodlines a collection of work by interdisciplinary artist Amber Doe. On display from October 8-28th, 2022. Opening reception 6pm, Saturday 8th

Amber Doe, @amberdoestudio is a multimedia artist who uses textile, sculpture and performance to bear witness to the experiences of black women even as American society aims to render us and our lives as invisible and meaningless. The show’s title comes from Jean Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth”: a psychological analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonialism. The works in this show are living, breathing, testaments to the ongoing effects of slavery and colonialism in contemporary life. A reflection of intergenerational trauma.  

Doe was an 2020/21 Abbey Awards Fellowship award holder and is a current 2022/23 Projecting All Voices Fellowship award holder. Her work has most recently been exhibited at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI and Amarillo Museum of Art for the AMOA 600 Biennial, Amarillo, TX.

SNAKEBITE presents Crisis! A new installation work by Chip Thomas. On display from September 10-30th. Opening reception Saturday 10th, 2022.

Chip Thomas aka @jetsonorama is a photographer, public artist and physician who has been working in a small clinic on the Navajo Nation since 1987.  There he coordinates the Painted Desert Project which he describes as a community building project which manifests as a constellation of murals painted by artists from the Navajo Nation as well as from around the world.

Thomas’ own public artwork consists of enlarged black and white photographs pasted onto structures along the roadside primarily on the Navajo Nation.  His motivation is to reflect back to the community the love they’ve shared with him over the years.

Crisis! draws from Thomas’ photographic archive to explore images printed and projected on sheer fabric. Audiences are invited to move through the space, between images and photographic spaces. Thomas was a 2018 Kindle Project gift recipient and in 2020 he was one of a handful of artists chosen by the UN to recognize the 75th anniversary of the UN’s founding.  Selected artists are to generate work that contributes to the envisioning and shaping of a more resilient and sustainable future.

SNAKEBITE presents When a Place is a Battery. A work of Props-objects and interactive experience by Geneva Foster Gluck. August 12 - 30, 2022.

When a Place Is a Battery is the opening show for SNAKEBITE. The works on display are talismans or reliquaries for greater energy-as-electricity awareness. They function as speculative energy sources, as batteries and prop-objects for performative interactions. Through a variety of materials including clay, recycled metals, and fabric, the works generate small amounts of electrical current which are expressed as light. In the social precarity of climate crisis, When a Place is a Battery acts as a meditation and expression of the artist’s desire for kinder and more just (energy-rich) systems, as well as an opportunity for audiences to think, feel, and care for energy in delicate and desirous ways.