The Deer Inbetween is on the cover and as a graphical essay created by Clement for the essay collection. More information here.

Let Me Let You Go has been selected as a 2022 Creative Capital Awardee!

“Creative Capital believes that funding the creation of new work by groundbreaking artists is vital to the vibrancy of our culture, society, and our democracy. We are dedicated to supporting artists who are pushing boundaries and asking challenging questions—especially now when new ideas are critical to imagining our future,” said Christine Kuan, Creative Capital President and Executive Director.

About Let Me Let You Go

Let Me Let You Go is a comedic science fiction feature about hope, grief and humor as everything falls apart. The story opens in present day San Francisco. Miguel, sick of his gig as a psychedelic trip sitter, steals mushrooms from his Silicon Valley client and Cary is abducted from a sidewalk by an unmarked security force. The pair meet in detention where MF, an investor interested in life-extension research and cultural preservation, offers the artists an immortality serum to survive imminent societal and ecological collapse. The narrative live action film includes some stop motion animation. Inspired by creative and healing powers of mushrooms and hallucinogens, Clement Hil Goldberg uses near future sci-fi to bring our focus back to Earth.

The lemur hanky I created for this exhibit is now part of a fundraiser for Black Trans Housing and Land Projects for more info check out https://hankyexhibit.bigcartel.com/

Read a new piece by Clement at SFMOMA Open Space “Queer and trans cultural lineage is hard to maintain ⁠— it’s always slipping away. One spring evening in 2002, I went out in search of a queer bar in Los Angeles.”… 

SFMOMA CUT Open Space from their programs starting 2022. Since the link above will probably become inactive, here is the full text written by Clement Goldberg edited by Open Space:

What You Missed Even If You Were There

Queer and trans cultural lineage is hard to maintain ⁠— it’s always slipping away. One spring evening in 2002, I went out in search of a queer bar in Los Angeles. I had transplanted to the City of Quartz in the late ’90s, but was unaware of the uprisings against police harassment that were waged at Cooper’s Do-nuts and Black Cat Tavern prior to the Compton’s Cafeteria and Stonewall riots in the Bay Area and New York. The fight for liberation had also wrought corporatization, and it took time to locate a space that offered kinship and aesthetic resonance. The gay and lesbian nightclubs known to me did not draw the trans subculture and intergenerational crowd my twenty-five-year-old self longed for.

But that night I wandered into the Parlour Club, a five-month-old bar on Santa Monica Boulevard triangulated by the Tomkat gay porn theater, a mortuary, and the Pleasure Chest sex shop. The bar was lathered in sumptuous reds. I felt summoned by the jukebox, antique mirrors, chandeliers, velvet curtains, vinyl perches, and petite inset stage at the helm of a dance floor.  Black balloons swirled above an uncharacteristically welcoming queer mecca, clues that I had accidentally crashed a private birthday party for Guinevere Turner, best known at the time for her screenplay adaptation (with Mary Haron) of American Psycho, and for her contributions to New Queer Cinema. I was invited to stay and watch the talent show, a darkly humorous cabaret tribute to the iconic writer, actor, and filmmaker.

The Parlour Club makes a cameo as part of a photo series by Kevin McCarty in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, written by the late Dr. José Esteban Muñoz, who — being Guinevere’s best friend — was also there. Muñoz characterizes the bar as “clearly and concretely the space where punk and queerness meet,” then hails art star Vaginal Davis as its “high priestess and black pope.” On Friday nights from 2003 until the bar shut down, Davis threw Bricktops, her conceptual art party styled after a 1920s speakeasy jazz cafe society evening and featuring live performances, DJs, dancing, films, and photography exhibitions; Vaginal’s online diary  would let you know what you missed even if you had been there. As would be the case for most of my twenties, including the years the bar operated (2002–2005), I was only vaguely aware of the formative cultural impact the people around me would have on my life and art practice. Collaborations seeded within those red walls continue to this day. I cannot say how many legendary underground artists performed there, but Davis’ blog makes for a thrilling account. Every Sunday was Unhappy Hour, a literary event run by Lydia Lunch, and then later on by Clint Catalyst and Shawna Kenney, who co-hosted that portal into a queer canon. I knew I had a lifelong friend when the writer Bett Williams spoke a hard truth on that stage: “No one loves your mix tapes as much as you do.” And an even harder one, I came to find, that no one will love queer culture as much as queers do.

The Parlour Club closed its doors when the owners felt it was time (rare agency given the constant closures and evictions of queer spaces), and became a vodka bar. The gorgeous neon marquee of the nearby Tomkat has since been replaced by an all-black facade; autographed hand- and footprints from adult film stars like John C. Holmes decorate its sidewalk. I returned to visit my former haunt and stood on the unremarkable cement out front wishing for an autographed set of prints from Vaginal Davis, who moved to Berlin after being priced out of Los Angeles.

In San Francisco, artists like Xandra Ibarra, Juanita More, and Julián Delgado Lopera (with RADAR Productions) have held respective queer displacement tours and commemorations in the Mission and Polk Gulch. The STUD — home to a vibrant intergenerational art community reminiscent of the Parlour Club, formed a co-op as part of its fight to remain in SoMa; its monthly series, A Bar of One’s Own, hosted by James Fleming and Mica Sigourney, provides entry to an enchanted literary realm. Audiences this past May were welcomed to the launch of Kevin Killian’s Stage Fright with a Poets Theater performance of his play Box of Rain. It was the last time many of us were able to see the beloved artist, poet, and playwright before he passed to the other side of the inter-dimensional fax machine featured in that play. San Francisco needs a Kevin Killian Alley or Kevin Killian Place for poets and artists to commit illicit late night acts in his honor. We need a place to slip away to.

SFMOMA’s Open Space is a home for unruly, non-instrumentalized gestures. We’re anchored in the Bay Area but we cast a wide net, commissioning and supporting critical + experimental + poetic ruminations by artists, writers, and thinkers from all over the world. We also host parties, performances, and other live events.

Our Future Ends, February 20th, 7pm Vortex Theater, followed by the Opening Night Party with Ah-Mer-Ah-Su and Krudxs Cubensi at 8:30pm, Austin, TX

Writer-director Clement Hil Goldberg has created a 50-minute masterpiece of surrealist political satire combining live action [performance] and stop-motion animation. A fantasy confection of glitter, style, kitsch and karma, Our Future Ends offers a neat, binary analogy between an anthropomorphized population of endangered lemurs and a postmodern cult of queer spirituality. The idea is that parallel stories of extinction face the animal population and authentically indie queer spaces, as each is threatened by forces of commerce, industrialism, opioids and cultural appropriation. There are songs and dances, DJs and video, all starring Brontez Purnell, Heather María Ács and Siobhan Aluvalot, with Zackary Drucker, Silas Howard, Xandra Ibarra, Ben McCoy and Maryam Farnaz Rostami as voices of the ancient, imperiled animated Malagasy.

— LA WEEKLY, by Shana Nys Dambrot

July 13th REDCAT Theater Outfest Film Festival LA

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Epilogue for Our Future Ends at the STUD in San Francisco on March 17, 2018. Photos by Alex Girard. Lemurians: Brontez Purnell, Heather María Ács. Cosmic DJ: Siobhan Aluvalot. Madame HP Blavatsky: John Foster Cartwright. Costumes by Margaret Bolton Grace. Lighting Design by Jerry Lee. Created by Clement Hil Goldberg. Presented by Some Serious Business at the 2018 CounterPulse Festival and SFMOMA Open Spaces Limited Edition Winter Series.

Epilogue for Our Future Ends is dance party and performance with new and restaged selections from Our Future Ends (a multidisciplinary satire about near extinct lemurs and long lost Lemuria). Epilogue continues the legacy of Lemurians (Brontez Purnell and Heather Acs), summons a Cosmic DJ (Siobhan Aluvalot) and occult luminary Madame Blavatsky (Lyddle Jean) and features a live performance by musician Hale May along with Our Future Ends remixes by TED M SUPERSTAR. March 17, 5-7pm at the STUD in SF

Epilogue for Our Future Ends is part of the inaugural CounterPulse Festival in affiliation with SFMOMA Open Spaces Limited Editions Winter Series. Visit counterpulse.org/cp-fest18 for more information.

Created by Clement Hil Goldberg
Presented by Some Serious Business
Costume Design by Margaret Cleaver
Original Music, Animation Score, and Remixes by TED M SUPERSTAR
Original Music by Hale May
Sound Engineering by Sophia Poirier
Choreography by Larry Arrington
Lighting Design by Jerry Lee

Trailer Credits:
Performance Photos by Robbie Sweeny Photography
“Telepathic” by Ted M. Superstar (featuring Brontez Purnell, Heather María Ács, Maryam Farnaz Rostami)

About:

Our Future Ends is a multidisciplinary satire that connects threats of extinction to wildlife and wild life. Oscillating between queer dance party, animation and theater, Epilogue for Our Future Ends at The STUD combines live performances from Brontez Purnell, Heather María Ács, and Siobhan Aluvalot as both long extinct Lemurians and the voices of stop motion animated lemurs (additionally voiced by Maryam Farnaz Rostami, Xandra Ibarra, Zackary Drucker, Ben McCoy, and Silas Howard). John Foster Cartwright joins the cast as occult writer Madame Blavatsky and musician Hale May performs a solo piece with calls from singing indri lemurs.