A&E

The restlessly creative Ang Kerfoot makes music, theater, visual art and more

Image
Ang Kerfoot
Photo: Jon Estrada / Special to the Weekly

Ang Kerfoot is a woman of many trades. For the past three years, the singer-songwriter has created experimental, trip-hop and jazz-infused bodies of work, including this year’s electric mélange, Fiesta de Cactus. But recently, she has turned to other artistic endeavors, things she’s always wanted to try but hadn’t until now.

This month, she’ll release Trumpster Babies, her first EP with husband and beatmaker Joseph Wozniak, just in time for the couple’s five-year wedding anniversary. “The album is all over the place with electronic beats and live guitar and live bass and drums,” she says.

Long before Kerfoot pursued her own solo efforts, she was collaborating in the music scene, releasing albums with another Vegas electronic producer, Dana Dau, and performing on and off with Vegas jam band staple Moksha. The self-described “sage-burning hippie wizard” is no stranger to taking on multiple projects. “I stay moving,” she says. “It keeps me sane.”

In June, Kerfoot submitted a story with friend and writer Liz Charon for the Las Vegas 48 Hour Film Project, taking home the award for Best “Thought Provoking” Film, and in September, Kerfoot collaborated with friend Joshua Smith for Cockroach Theatre’s 24 Hour Play Project, whipping up a story about storm chasers who meet on Tinder.

“I’ve wanted to be on Broadway since I was a kid,” Kerfoot says. “And I always wanted to do writing for it. I just wanted to explore it to try to understand the dynamic of it and how it works.”

Now that she has her foot in that door, she’s working with local theater and improv groups like Cockroach, Majestic Repertory and Bleach, filling in and volunteering wherever they need help. “I had been on a path looking for a theater tribe,” Kerfoot says. “I’m always asking, ‘Where are my people at?’ to myself. It feels really natural in that scene because everybody you meet is fluid in hobbies and motivated and holding down a job, too.”

In between her music and theater efforts, Kerfoot is a social worker and employment trainer at a local Goodwill store, coaching people for the Bureau of Vocational Rehabilitation and “helping those who need a hand up,” she says. There, she has also found time to pursue visual art. “We process old books, so I’m always finding old pages on the floor,” she says. That led her to creating her own blackout poetry, a minimalist art form in which people use a marker to “black-out” the text from pages in old books, creating an entirely new meaning and poem.

For her September joint show at ReBar with Britney Child, all of the pages she repurposed were found at Goodwill, and each poem was completed on her work breaks. “They can prove that if they want to look,” she laughs, pointing to the cameras in her office.

And if you notice a collaborative thread running through all of Kerfoot’s projects, it’s no accident. She credits her network of friends for pushing her out of her comfort zone and into new arenas. “Without collaborations, I don’t think any of this would’ve been successful,” she says. “That’s what gets me motivated.”

Share
Photo of Leslie Ventura

Leslie Ventura

Get more Leslie Ventura
Top of Story