Claire Rousay and Jacob Wick is a drums and trumpet duo. The pair chew up the macho and militaristic histories of their respective instruments and spit out vulnerability and absurdity. They have been performing together since June 2018.
Claire Rousay is an improviser, percussionist, and event organizer based in San Antonio, Texas. Her work explores queerness, human physicality, and self perception through the use of physical objects and their potential sounds.
Rousay has recently performed with Tom Carter, Lori Goldston, Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten, Paul Giallorenzo, and Brandon Lopez. She currently works extensively within duo contexts with both Michael Foster and Jacob Wick. rousay has toured extensively across North America, booking over 200 dates in 2017 alone. In 2018 she participated in the Sonic Transmissions Festival and NMASS Festival as well as performed at venues such as Elastic Arts and Issue Project Room. Her work recently received support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Rousay curates Contemporary Whatever, a monthly series for adventurous art in San Antonio; she also collaborated with Artpace to produce Right Now Festival in August 2017, which brought experimental and improvising performers to town from across Texas.
Jacob Wick is an improviser, writer, and artist. His work is dedicated to and informed by queer feelings and queer politics.As an improviser and trumpet player, he has performed in a variety of contexts, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kennedy Center, and the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC). He has performed with Matana Roberts, Andrea Neumann, Gerald Cleaver, Katherine Young, Judith Hamann, Toshimaru Nakamura, and others.As a writer, he has published in print and online, including regular blog posts on Bad at Sports on the artists and art scenes in Los Angeles and Mexico City. He was an associate editor for What We Want is Free: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art (SUNY Press, 2014). He currently runs Reportaje, a blog dedicated to reporting on contemporary art from an infrastructural perspective.As an artist, he has organized projects in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area. In 2013, with the assistance of The Think Tank that has yet to be named…, he organized Germantown City Hall, a temporary city hall for the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia modeled after 19th-century anarcho-utopian town halls. His work is currently dedicated to developing and holding workshops and working groups.