LESLIE DREYER
Leslie is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer creating sculptural works, installations and performance/interventions from within a movement, which demands a right to the city and an end to the commodification of our public and private lives. Her latest activities embody a hybrid form of public spectacle, guerilla theatre intervention, performance art, and smart mob (preplanned, designed and/or choreographed flash mobs). These collaborative interventions have been featured in outlets such as BBC, ABC, CNN, AP, The Progressive, Huff Post, The Nation, SF Bay Guardian and even denounced on Glenn Beck's Fox News show, which she considers a testament to the work's success.
Recently, Leslie planned and designed several actions with Heart of the City Collective to stop Google buses in their tracks and spotlight the tech boom's impact on displacement and wealth disparity in the Bay Area. She's also working on projects that highlight the hypocrisy of the tech industry’s “sharing economy” and “disruption” exposing its appropriation of progressive language, its for-profit surveillance and control of our data and communications. Through a combined practice as artist/activist/educator, she continues to ask: What tactics and strategies can be deployed to both reveal and destabilize neoliberal trends exacerbated by the tech boom? And how can socially engaged cultural works challenge the status quo, while resisting capitalism’s ability to fold all cultural production into its agenda?
Let's talk about it.