ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.
Friday, March 13th, at 8pm, ISSUE presents a two-part evening featuring interdisciplinary artists MV Carbon (2010 AIR) and Keke Hunt (2023 AIR).
Across many years of work with ISSUE, MV Carbon has developed a practice around sculptural objects that function as musical instruments, amplifying the ritual, rhythm and momentum embedded in music. Most recently in 2019, Carbon honored Suzanne Fiol, the late founder of ISSUE in Suzanne Fiol: Ten Years Alive, in a performance during the exhibition of Fiol’s mixed-media artwork curated in collaboration with her daughter, Sarah Fiol. This March, Carbon taps into the mystery of the human mechanism, exploring themes of interchangeability, transmission, and the transmogrification of mind and matter using her "Psychophonic Instruments". Drawing on the Greek roots psyke (soul) and phone (sound), psychophony describes a listening experience that folds spatial imprints into external vibration. Using vintage telephone receivers, electric cello, hand-built instruments, gongs, and evolving synth textures, Carbon creates systems that invite listeners into a dynamic dialogue between space, mind, and matter.
Opening the evening, Keke Hunt premieres new material alongside earlier work in a pop-electronic performance. Over the course of her 2023 residency, Hunt developed a tech-forward music video and live performance for her long running solo project, Just The Right Height, in collaboration with digital artist Ben Mendelewicz. Hunt’s residency was also realized through an ongoing partnership between ISSUE and Harvestworks’ Technology Immersion Program, supporting artists’ creation of new work using evolving and innovative technologies.
MV Carbon is an artist exploring the transformative relationship between sound, space, and place. Her practice investigates how sound and technology can be used to reveal hidden information, influence sensory perception, and generate new aesthetic relationships to space and time. Speculative sound synthesis shapes her process and musical output. Decay and repetition expose the underlying architecture of sound, where the present melds with the future and resonance emerges. Carbon uses voice, electric cello, gongs, vintage microphones, and magnetic tape to reveal and shape the immediate environment. She treats space as an active, responsive organism, emphasizing interaction and emergence. Handmade circuits and sculptural objects are melded with voice and synthesizers, allowing unexpected musical logics to form through sonic saturation. Analog techniques are combined with oscillating strings, fusing sonic space onto live compositions. Carbon has solo and collaborative music released on record labels including Kill Rock Stars-5RC, Atavistic Records, Discombobulate, Ecstatic Peace, Chaikin Records, Hanson, Load Records, No Fun Productions, Various Artists, and Veglia.
Keke Hunt’s work spans songwriting, live performance and technology. Hunt has released numerous record and cassette editions under the project name Just the Right Height, while touring as a mainstay of the contemporary underground music scene. Hunt’s Just The Right Height project combines blistering samples with algorithmically arranged fragments of existing songs lyrics, in a vocal centered performance that speaks to the tension between the production of market driven pop products and the universal power of pop music. Hunt develops short motifs utilizing recognizable era-specific stock drum samples which reference textures from Top 40 hits and dance music of the last 30 years. Using a standard verse-chorus format, she constructs songs where rhythms depend on the vocal cadence and phrasing, inverting the expectation that the vocal should follow the meter of its rhythmic backing. Coarse samples are triggered in real time in correlation with a piercing deadpan delivery. Hunt's deconstructed lyrics teeter between broken syntax and salient moments of clarity where essential pop sentiments are distilled. Hunt is currently working on her third album, I Love Everything.
