Every Ocean Hughes

Every Ocean Hughes (born 1977), formerly known as Emily Roysdon, is a New York and Stockholm based artist and writer, currently a Professor of Art at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. Hughes is a multimedia interdisciplinary artist, using performance, photography, print making, text, video, curating and collaboration as media for artistic expression.

Hughes was an undergraduate at Hampshire College, from which she graduated in 1999. In 2002, she completed the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hughes received an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006.

In 2002 Hughes helped co-found the feminist genderqueer artist collective and annual literary journal Lesbians To The Rescue (LTTR), which remained an active part of the queer art theory community until 2008. LTTR was dedicated to "highlighting the work of radical communities whose goals are sustainable change, queer pleasure, and critical feminist productivity." The other co-founders of the collective are Ginger Brooks Takahashi and K8 Hardy.

Hughes developed the concept "ecstatic resistance" in 2009 to talk about the impossible and imaginary in politics. In her essay on the topic, Hughes says, "Ecstatic Resistance is a project, practice, partial philosophy and set of strategies. It develops the positionality of the impossible alongside a call to re-articulate the imaginary. Ecstatic Resistance is about the limits of representation and legibility — the limits of the intelligible, and strategies that undermine hegemonic oppositions. It wants to talk about pleasure in the domain of resistance — sexualizing modern structures in order to centralize instability and plasticity in life, living, and the self. It is about waiting, and the temporality of change. Ecstatic Resistance wants to think about all that is unthinkable and unspeakable in the Eurocentric, phallocentric world order."In addition to her essay being published in Grand Arts and Toronto's C Magazine, the project also was inclusive of a "practice, partial philosophy, set of strategies, and group exhibition(s)" that were all organized and curated by Hughes.

The two simultaneous sister shows were exhibited at Grand Arts (Nov. 13 - Jan. 16, 2010) and X Initiative in NYC (Nov. 21 - Feb. 6, 2010) and incorporated the art and performance of Yael Bartana, Sharon Hayes, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, My Barbarian, Jeanine Oleson, Ulrike Ottinger, Adrian Piper, Dean Spade and Craig Willse, A.L. Steiner, Rosa Barba, Juan Davila, Xylor Jane, My Barbarian in collaboration with Liudni Slibinai, Ulrike Muller, A.L. Steiner, Joyce Wieland, Leah Gilliam, Julianna Snapper, PIG/ Politically Involved Girls (Wu Ingrid Tsang, Zackary Drucker, and Mariana Marroquin), and Ian White. In the New York Times review of the exhibition, Roberta Smith wrote that "Ms. Roysdon’s title connotes a spirit of Zen activism, with absurdity substituting for ideology, but with politics still in the picture."

Hughes's many other collaborations include costume design for choreographers Levi Gonzalez, Vanessa Anspaugh and Faye Driscoll, as well as lyric writing for The Knife, and JD Samson & MEN.

Recent solo projects include new commissions from Performance Room, Tate Modern (London), If I Can't Dance (Amsterdam), PICA's T:BA festival, Visual Art Center (Austin), Art in General (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Konsthall C (Stockholm) and a Matrix commission from the Berkeley Art Museum.

Hughes's projects have been shown at the 2010 Whitney Biennial; Greater NY at MoMA/PS1; The Generational, New Museum (NY); Manifesta 8; Participant, Inc. (NY); Museo Tamayo (Mexico City); Power Plant (Toronto); and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid).

Hughes completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001 and an Interdisciplinary MFA at UCLA in 2006. She has received grants and residencies from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2010), Franklin Furnace (2009), Wexner Center for the Arts (2009), Art Matters (2008), and the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS, 2008). In 2012 Hughes was a finalist for the Future Generation Art Prize.

• The New York Public Library's Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York