Tuesday, October 3rd from 6-10pm, ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary at our 22 Boerum Pl. theater with projections of work commissioned for The Steve Circuit (2020), an episodic series of videos and digital artwork dedicated to the late beloved poet Steve Dalachinsky developed by his wife, painter and poet Yuko Otomo, and interdisciplinary artist and 2010 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence (AIR), Matt Mottel.
Born in Brooklyn in 1946, Dalachinsky was an unforgettable fixture within particular strains of experimental music, poetry, and art—and at cultural happenings and gatherings of all kinds in Lower Manhattan and beyond. Dalachinsky was an important figure to many. He passed away September 16th, 2019.
Steve’s art was created in tandem with the public life he lived. The places he inhabited—arts venues, community gardens, the New York Public Library neighborhood branch, his Spring Street sidewalk store—were all part of his daily routine. He was influenced by the culture he witnessed. He created his art both in public and at home. Late at night, in his apartment, after returning from film screenings, art openings, and multiple concerts, he returned to his collage artwork and to type up the poems he had written by hand during the day out in the world.
Over the course of six events throughout the Summer of 2020, historical sites were revealed in a weekly online presentation, co-commissioned with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). Each week, videos made by Otomo & Mottel were streamed pairing Dalachinsky text, recordings, and artwork, with additional artistic collaborators who were part of the Dalachinsky orbit. The online cultural map and presentation provided a “virtual polaroid snapshot” of Downtown New York’s cultural history. In addition to Otomo and Mottel, the series featured contributions from Vito Ricci & Lise Vachon, Andrew Lampert, Jean Carla Rodea & Gerald Cleaver, Tom Surgal & Lin Culbertson, William Parker & Matthew Shipp, Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer, and Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille. On September 16th, 2020, The Steve Circuit concluded with a walking tour as a video essay by Otomo & Mottel streamed on the LMCC website in which they shared their insight, stories and “astral logick” as they returned to the sites featured in the broadcasts.
The October 3rd showing is interspersed with a panel conversation featuring Otomo, Mottel and current AIR, Jean Carla Rodea, moderated by writer Clifford Allen, who recently published Singularity Codex: Matthew Shipp on RogueArt.
SCHEDULE
6:00pm - Spring Street with Vito Ricci & Lise Vachon
6:27pm - Anthology Film Archives with Andrew Lampert
6:53pm - Tonic & The Knitting Factory with Jean Carla Rodea & Gerald Cleaver, White Out (Tom Surgal & Lin Culbertson)
8:00pm - Panel Conversation
8:45pm - CBGB’s Gallery & 6 & B Garden with William Parker & Matthew Shipp
9:30pm - The World Trade Center with Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer
9:38pm - Downtown Music Gallery with Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille
Between Friday, Sep 29th and Saturday, Oct 7th, ISSUE invites audiences to experience presentations of works - originally commissioned for online distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic - at the 22 Boerum Pl. theater. The commissioned work will be shown as projected installations, coupled with a variety of artist talks, for a limited capacity environment of 74 people.
In response to our suspension of in-person programming during the onset of the pandemic, ISSUE commissioned more than 250 artists to present free online programs through series such as: Isolated Field Recordings; The Steve Circuit; Heroes Are Gang Leaders; Distant Pairs; With Womens Work; and 90 presentations of Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room amongst others. Our commitment to support these artists mattered more than ever during the pandemic given the challenges that artists and many small cultural organizations across NYC experienced and still currently face. ISSUE is pleased to present these works as installed projections for audiences to experience in person, in ISSUE’s home theater, gathering with our community in celebration of the organization’s 20th Anniversary.
These initiatives complemented ISSUE’s work publishing archival documentation on online platforms currently collected and streamable on our expansive Archive page on the ISSUE website. ISSUE currently maintains a publicly accessible archive of hundreds of published video and audio recordings. These materials are a freely accessible collection of performance documentation that spans our recent and historic work.
During these presentations Laurie Berg’s (Sports) Bar-In-Residence will be activated as well as a lobby installation by Eva Davidova: Vinson and Catherine in the Garden, a series of augmented reality prints.
This Fall marks the 20th Anniversary of ISSUE and will be celebrated with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events. During the Anniversary celebration, between phases of renovation, ISSUE returns to our 22 Boerum Pl. theater for a special series of twenty limited-capacity events. Featuring artists from across our history as well as new projects, these gatherings - including our 20th Anniversary Gala - present an opportunity to celebrate and support ISSUE as we continue an ambitious calendar of programming. Join us in recognizing this important milestone in our history.
These gatherings are free with RSVP, and members retain exclusive access to all limited-capacity events until sold out.
Panelist Bios
Yuko Otomo is a visual artist and a bilingual poet of Japanese origin. She also writes art criticism, essays, travelogues, translates and keeps her cultural journal. She showed her visual work at Tribes Gallery, Anthology Film Archives Courthouse Gallery, ABC No Rio, Brecht Forum, Gallery 128 and Vision Festival etc. She read at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, Bowery Poetry Club, The Stone, ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Cornelia St. Café, NYU, and NYPL in NYC and in France, Germany and Japan. Her publications include Garden: Selected Haiku (Beehive Press), Small Poems (Ugly Ducking Press), The Hand of the Poet (UDP), Cornell Box Poems (Sisyphus Press), PINK (Sisyphus Press), STUDY & Other Poems on Art (UDP), Elements (Feral Press), KOAN (New Feral Press), FROZEN HEATWAVE: a collaborative linked poem project with Steve Dalachinsky, Anonymous Landscape (Lithic Press), In Delacroix's Garden, a collaborative book project with Basil King (Spuyten Duyvil) and the most recent PINK (Lithic Press) is due in the very near future. She lives in New York City.
Matt Mottel enlivens primary source materials and creates collaborative artworks that amplify knowledge and provide access to subterranean culture. Social activism and cultural community are threads that run throughout Mottel’s extensive body of performances, videos, sculptures and music. Mottel’s comprehensive artistic foraging stems from his native New York upbringing. ‘Moonlight University’ was in session, with Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo, who he first encountered as a teenager on the downtown New York scene in the late 90’s. In 2010, Mottel was selected by the late ISSUE Project Room founder Suzanne Fiol as an Artist-In-Residence, and it was in this period that he developed an ongoing multimedia project that utilizes the cultural photography of his father, Syeus Mottel. In 2021, he was the co 'Improviser in Residence' in Moers Germany. He staged a solo exhibition in Vienna at Gallery Gundula Gruber on the history of the 18th century Keytar. He is currently a Media Arts Professor at New Jersey City University and Brooklyn College.
ISSUE 2023 Artist-In-Residence Jean Carla Rodea is a research-based interdisciplinary artist and educator. Her/their work involves a variety of disciplines and mediums such as music, sound, poetry, vocal performance and performance art, photography, video, movement, and sculpture. Her/their artistic practice deals with spaces and instances where problematic socio-political and cultural constructs are rendered visible through multimedia installations and performances. As a musician and improviser, Jean Carla is dedicated to performing and composing various music/sound in diverse settings–from solo to large ensembles. She/they have performed and recorded with William Parker, Darius Jones’ vocal quartet Elizabeth-Caroline Unit, Gerald Cleaver’s Uncle June, Anthony Braxton’s Syntactical Ghost Trance Music Choir, and Cecilia Lopez’s Machinic Fantasies. In addition, she/they lead her/their multi-media projects; Buscando a Marina/Looking for Marina, and Nine Easy Steps Toward Oblivion. Jean Carla has worked with Asiya Wadud, Jo Wood-Brown, Patricia Nicholson, Art Jones, Miriam Parker, rebeca medina, Merche Blasco, Amirtha Kidambi, Rachel Bersen, etc. They/she has performed extensively and shown work at Roulette Intermedium, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Knockdown Center, Judson Church, Danspace, Center for Performance Research, Panoply Lab, The Clemente, FiveMyles, mh PROJECT nyc, to mention a few.
Clifford Allen is a writer, archivist, scholar, historian, and concert presenter now living in New York’s Hudson Valley. He has written for such publications as The New York City Jazz Record, Point of Departure, Signal To Noise, Paris Transatlantic, All About Jazz, and Tiny Mix Tapes. His liner notes appear on over 40 albums from labels including Amish, Astral Spirits, AUM Fidelity, Balance Point Acoustics, Clean Feed, Cosmic Myth, ESP-Disk’, FMP, New World Records, NoBusiness, NowAgain, RogueArt, ugEXPLODE, Unseen Worlds, and Valley of Search. Singularity Codex: Matthew Shipp on RogueArt, released in the summer of 2023, is his first book.
