Michelle Boule

Cauleen Smith

Matthew Papich

Che Chen

Jen Rosenblit and Jules Gimbrone

ISSUE Project Room’s 2012 Emerging Artists Commissions will focus on transdisciplinary practices with a special attention to contemporary political, aesthetic and social concerns. This year we attempted to reach outside our normal range of focus to include a wider variety of artists working across different media. ISSUE’s curators Lawrence Kumpf and Zach Layton worked with panelists Matthew Walker, James Hoff, Howie Chen and Ulrike Muller to select this year’s commissions. We are very much looking forward to working with the applicants in the upcoming year.

ISSUE Project Room’s Emerging Artists Commission program is made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation; the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund; Meet the Composer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

Cellist and improviser Okkyung Lee is a 2011 ISSUE Artist-in-Residence. A native of Korea, Okkyung Lee has been developing her own voice in a contemporary cello performance, improvisation and composition. using her solid classical training as a springboard, she incorporates jazz, sounds, Korean traditional and pop music, and noise with extended techniques to create her unique blend of music. She has received a composer commission from New York State Council on the Arts (2007) and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant (2010).

In long white shadows the performance space is explored by performers who constantly change their relationships within and towards to it. The audience is faced with rather unusual ways of perceiving the music and movement: simple, slow and hypnotic at times.

Michelle Boulé is a dance artist, teacher, and BodyTalk practitioner based in New York. She has been performing and teaching internationally over the last 11 years. Since 2001 she has worked with Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People and in 2010 received a New York Dance and Performance Award “Bessie” for her performance and creative collaboration in Last Meadow by Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. She has also worked with the Deborah Hay Dance Company (William Forsythe commission If I Sing to You), John Scott, David Wampach, John Jasperse, Liz Santoro, Neal Beasley, Donna Uchizono, Christine Elmo, Beth Gill, Judith Sanchez-Ruiz, Doug Varone (Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Opera Colorado), Netta Yerushalmy, and Gabriel Masson. She is part of the teaching faculty and Artists Advisory Council of Movement Research in New York. She has also been a faculty/artist-in-residence at Hollins University (Roanoke, VA) and the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign, IL). She participated in the SKITE artists residency in Caen, France in 2010, and in 2002, she was a DanceWeb scholarship recipient at Impulstanz in Vienna. She has shown work in New York at the Center for Performance Research, Judson Church, P.S. 122, Danspace Project, the Bushwick Starr and at the Krannert Center in Illinois and the University of Utah.

ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation; the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund; Meet the Composer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

2011 Artist-in-Residence Prince Rama will transform ISSUE Project Room into a point of origins. They will construct a “sacred space” using gathered matter from off-site urban wilds of Brooklyn. Audience members will be invited to build their own instruments and utilize them in an extended jam session open to anyone who wishes to attend (regardless of musical skill). This aims to investigate the utopian symbology of “the jam session” as a poetic reenactment and microcosmic creation of an ideal democratic society. Cut off from the rest of the world, yet wholly imbedded within it, this ritual space becomes a NO PLACE.

**PLEASE BRING ALONG AN INSTRUMENT!**

ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation; the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund; Meet the Composer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

“Over the last half decade, Yarn/Wire has immensely expanded the repertoire for two pianists and two percussionists. For their 2012 Artist-in-Residence stint, the ensemble will work with a diverse roster of composers, performers, and sonic architects and utilize the full capabilities of Issue Project Room’s acoustics and speaker array to produce works of both epic scale and scope. Highlights include collaborations with Pete Swanson, Tristan Perich, and Nathan Davis.”

Yarn/Wire is a chamber quartet specializing in the performance of 21st century music. A unique instrumental combination of two percussionists (Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg) and two pianists (Laura Barger and Ning Yu) allows Yarn/Wire to interface with both traditional performance practice and emergent stylistic trends with ease. Founded in 2005 at Stony Brook University, the members of Yarn/Wire have extensive performance and pedagogic experience encompassing international and domestic music festivals, college and university residences, and substantive work in the avant-garde theater and DIY/punk worlds. Frequent collaborations with composers on new work form a significant portion of the ensemble’s activities. In addition to presenting multiple US premieres, Yarn/Wire has given the world premieres of over two dozen new works written specifically for the ensemble.

Established in 2006, ISSUE’s AIR program provides emerging artists with a 3-month residency including rehearsal space, production, curatorial, and pr/marketing support to create new works, to reach the next stage in their artistic development, and gain exposure to a broad public audience. ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation, the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

“During my residency at IPR I will be working on a few related projects. The first is to continue an ongoing investigation of difference tones, which are pitches that occur in the ear and brain as a result of two or more pure tones. I hope to develop a tuning program on the computer that will aid in a research period of listening to specific intervals and frequency ranges, while noting how the resultant ear tones appear to sound different from each other. As part of this project I will perform on a difference tone keyboard which I will begin to develop at IPR. In conjunction with this project I will continue to work with transducers, exciting various metals, paper, and cardboard, while delving into the materiality of sound. This project, combined with the difference tone project, will manifest as an installation in which materials in the room sing and dance with ear tones. As part of this project I will also work with human resonators, doing a series of one-on-one massage performances.”

Sergei Tcherepnin is a Brooklyn-based artist who uses performance, composition, and installation to explore the materiality of sound and its physical and psychological effects on the listener. He has performed throughout NYC as an improviser with piano and modular synthesizer at venues such as the Stone, Roulette, Abrons Art Center, the Whitney Museum, the Tank, Douglas Street Music Collective, Paris London West Nile, and i-Beam Brooklyn. His compositions have been performed by ensembles such as Transit, Da Capo Chamber Players, St Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, American Wind Symphony Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, at spaces such as Merkin Hall, Cami Hall, Dia:Beacon, Chelsea Art Museum, Diapason Gallery, Louis Kahn’s “Point Counterpoint II,” National Youth Olympic Stadium (Tokyo), Moscow Composers Union Concert Hall, St. Petersburg Composers Union Concert Hall, and the Fisher Center for Performing Arts at Bard College. His multi-channel performances and installations have been mounted at Audio Visual Arts, Societé (Berlin), Casey Kaplan Gallery, 47 Canal, and Recess Art.

Established in 2006, ISSUE’s AIR program provides emerging artists with a 3-month residency including rehearsal space, production, curatorial, and pr/marketing support to create new works, to reach the next stage in their artistic development, and gain exposure to a broad public audience. ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation, the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

“After performing as a musician using cassettes and electronics for close to a decade, I am now ready to move on to a new phase of my career. I would like to work more in interdisciplinary fields of collaboration, with filmmakers and choreographers. Moving images captured on film and moving bodies of dancers have always been vivid sources of inspiration for me in creating sound. I would like to experiment in between these fields, exploring the gaps and unknown territories within collaboration.”

Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and visual artist. Onda was born in Japan and currently resides in New York. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project: works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman. Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. In another of his projects, Cinemage, Onda produces slide projections of still photo images. Onda has collaborated with artists such as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Alan Licht, Loren Connors, Oren Ambarchi, Noël Akchoté, Jac Berrocal, Linda Sharrock, and Blixa Bargeld.

Established in 2006, ISSUE’s AIR program provides emerging artists with a 3-month residency including rehearsal space, production, curatorial, and pr/marketing support to create new works, to reach the next stage in their artistic development, and gain exposure to a broad public audience. ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation, the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

“During my residency I intend to expand the vocabulary of Liturgy and Transcendental Black Metal along three trajectories.  First I will explore and enhance resonances between the “burst beat” concept with techniques from the European avant-garde and American experimental traditions.  Secondly I’ll explore multi-channel sound installation, creating an Ecstatic Space using autocatalysis, motion sensor and video elements.  Third I will write and present in lecture form a Treatise on the Arkwork.  These developments are en route to the composition of an apocalyptic Blakean minimalist black metal opera in the spirit of Scriabin, to be titled 01010n.”

Photo by Jason Nocito

Hunter Hunt-Hendrix is the singer, guitarist and songwriter for the Brooklyn black metal band Liturgy. Born 1985 in NYC, he matriculated at Columbia University with a B.A. in philosophy. During that time he also studied contemporary composition (electroacoustics, extended techniques and a seminar with Tristan Murail) while also maintaining a close connection to the D.I.Y. Brooklyn music scene, playing in hardcore, metal and math rock bands. In 2008 he formed Liturgy, a self-christened “Transcendental Black Metal” band committed to developing and enhancing resonances between black metal and various domains of avant-garde culture: serious music, contemporary art and contemporary philosophy. Liturgy has toured extensively in the US and Europe and gained a reputation for straddling the worlds of experimental music, indie rock and metal — playing festivals as diverse the Roadburn Festival, the Donau Festival and the New Yorker Festival — and has received accolades from the New York Times, Pitchfork, Berliner Zeitung, Decibel and others. In 2009 Liturgy released their first full-length on 20 Buck Spin, an underground metal label. Later that year Hunt-Hendrix delivered the lecture “Transcendental Black Metal” at the now-legendary Hideous Gnosis black metal theory symposium. The text of the lecture was subsequently published in the academic journal Lacanian Ink. In 2011, Thrill Jockey records released Liturgy’s sophomore release Aesthethica (called “one of the year’s most bracing” in a recent NYT review), cementing Liturgy’s place on the vanguard of experimental rock and stirring great controversy within the metal community. Hunt-Hendrix has also participated in a number of multimedia collaborations, including a performance with Kai Althoff, Brandon Stosuy and the Mirror Me Group (Dispatch gallery, 2009) and the Pipeline project with Kingsboro Press (W/ gallery, 2011). Current projects include an ongoing collaboration with abstract painter Erik Lindman and work on a new video art piece entitled “Genesis Caul”.

Established in 2006, ISSUE’s AIR program provides emerging artists with a 3-month residency including rehearsal space, production, curatorial, and pr/marketing support to create new works, to reach the next stage in their artistic development, and gain exposure to a broad public audience. ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation, the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

Hunter Hunt Hendrix

Aki Onda

Sergei Tcherepnin

Yarn/Wire

This year ISSUE recruited MV Carbon, Marie Losier and Alan Licht as guest panelists in addition to a recommending committee comprised of Kathleen Forde, Claire Chase, Robert Crouch, Hamish Dunbar, Tony Herrington, Jason Kahn, Andrew Lampert, George Lewis, Yann Novak, Josh Rubin, Mat Schultz and Esther Venrooy. The panelists will work with ISSUE curators Lawrence Kumpf and Zach Layton, Development Coordinator Matthew Walker and Executive Director Ed Patuto in selecting four artists or collectives for the 2012 presenting year.  We greatly look forward to working with these artists in the upcoming year.

Established in 2006, ISSUE’s AIR program provides emerging artists with a 3-month residency including rehearsal space, production, curatorial, and pr/marketing support to create new works, to reach the next stage in their artistic development, and gain exposure to a broad public audience. ISSUE’s Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, through generous support from the Jerome Foundation, the Suzanne Fiol Memorial Fund, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York’s 62 counties.

Photo by Brad Buehring

Two of our artists-in-residence for 2011, Nate Wooley & James Ilgenfritz, [Nate Wooley & MIVOS Quartet + Peter Evans, Saturday 6/18, FREE | RSVP] performed the other night at ISSUE’s future home 110 Livingston for a special membership event in the space. The duo, a pair of virtuoso listeners, left plenty of space for the room’s acoustics to take over. Check out their performance, available via the WFMU Free Music Archive.