Thursday, October 10th, ISSUE is honored to present an evening in celebration of the organization’s beloved late founder Suzanne Fiol. The event is an open showcase of Suzanne Fiol: Ten Years Alive, an exhibition of Suzanne’s mixed media work organized in collaboration with Suzanne’s daughter, Sarah Fiol, who gives an introduction to the work. The evening presents a conversation with Suzanne’s close friends: artists Kathy Brew, Michelle Handelman, and Kimiko Hahn centered around themes from Suzanne’s unfinished book/film proposal The Mothers of Creation / The Matriarch Project, while also highlighting each speaker’s own artistic practices and work. Interdisciplinary artist, composer, and 2010 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence MV Carbon, also a close friend of Suzanne, stages new work within the exhibition setting.
In addition to her leadership role in the performing arts, Suzanne Fiol was a respected photographer and visual artist. During the1990s and early 2000s, Fiol created large-scale photo collages, which she then layered with paint to expressively expand the images’ latent emotions. Suzanne Fiol: Ten Years Alive features original works that incorporate paint superimposed on photographs, exploring the territories of love, relationships, identity, sexuality, and motherhood.
In response to the exhibition, artists, writers, filmmakers Kathy Brew and Michelle Handelman, and author and poet Kimiko Hahn, will be in conversation exploring Suzanne Fiol’s Mothers of Creation / The Matriarch Project, a documentary film and book project that planned to showcase ethnographic portraits of women artists: discussing struggles, successes, and their own role as a “mother of creation,” a term of endearment coined by Fiol to highlight the creative potential of femininity. In a proposal for the film/book project Fiol notes:
“Birth comes in many forms. Some women give birth to human life. Some women birth intellectual, artistic and spiritual gifts for humankind. And some do both, sharing in different ways [...] Through their work and their example, these women have not only planted new seeds of knowledge and aesthetic vision in our culture; they have also created a legacy that infuses others with the courage to bring forth their own gifts.”
Returning to ISSUE after her 2017 collaboration with Bradley Eros, MV Carbon stages a live performance exploring autonomous approaches to producing sound. Working with subjects such as interchangeability, the human mechanism, perceptive states of consciousness, and the empirical force of nature, she finds music within form by producing patterns onto objects through momentum. Her cello resonates like a human voice and she often lets it speak for itself through improvisational approaches. At ISSUE, Carbon’s performance incorporates gong, cello, voice, reel-to-reel tape, video projections and amplified decorative objects to create a percussive bed overlapping with her electric cello playing.
Kathy Brew is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. She recently served as Guest Curator for the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight (2017-2019) and continues as a Curatorial Consultant in MoMA’s Film Department. Other positions include: Curator for Lincoln Center’s NY Video Festival; Co-Director of the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History; Director, Thundergulch/Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s new media arts initiative; Curatorial Consultant, WNET, Reel New York. Her writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Women, Art & Technology; Documentary Magazine; Civilization. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts MFA Art Practice Department and the Graduate Department of Media Studies at the New School. www.designisonefilm.com
Michelle Handelman is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer whose work pushes against the boundaries of gender, race, and sexuality. She is a 2019 Creative Capital awardee and Guggenheim Fellow, and has received numerous awards including a commission from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for her multiscreen installation Hustlers & Empires (2018). Her work has shown internationally, including signs and symbols, NYC (2019); SFMOMA (2018); Broad Art Museum (2013); MIT List Visual Arts Center (2010); PARTICIPANT INC, NYC (2009); PERFORMA Biennial (2005), and her writing has been published in many journals and anthologies, most recently in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media (Fall 2018). She is Acting Chair and Associate Professor in the Film, Media and Performing Arts department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC.
Kimiko Hahn is the author of ten books of poems, most recently Foreign Bodies (W.W. Norton, forthcoming 2020), an exploration of how objects take over current events, one’s life, and even one’s body. Previous work includes: Brain Fever (WWN, 2014) and Toxic Flora (WWN, 2010), both collections inspired by science. Hahn takes pleasure in the challenges of collaboration: writing text for film (Coal Fields by Bill Brand, Ain't Nuthin' But a She-Thing MTV special, and Everywhere at Once by Holly Fisher and based on Peter Lindbergh’s still photos and narrated by Jeanne Moreau); artwork (Lauren Henkin’s photographic series); and Dovetail, a chapbook with poet Tamiko Beyer. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, City University of New York.
MV Carbon’s work encompasses live performance, sound, film, painting, and multimedia installation. Carbon has LP solo releases on Ecstatic Peace (US), and Discombobulate (UK). As well as her solo work, Carbon is currently part of music ensemble HEVM with Hunter Hunt-Hendrix and Eve Essex, and Metalux with Jenny Graf Sheppard; with releases on Load Records (US), Hanson Records (US), 5RC (US). Carbon has collaborated with many artists over the years, including Aki Onda, Bradley Eros, Brian Chase, C. Spencer Yeh, Charlemagne Palestine, Evan Parker, Larry 7, Lesley Flanigan, Maria Chavez, Mario Diaz de Leon, Nick Zinner, Okkyung Lee, Richard Garet, Shelley Hirsch, Tony Conrad, Tristian Perich, Wolf Eyes, and Zach Layton. Carbon has been awarded residencies at The Clocktower Gallery (NY), Elektronmusikstudion (SE), ISSUE Project Room (NY), Koncertkirken Blaagaardssplads (DK), Pioneer Works (NY), Q02 (BE), and Roulette, (NY). She has performed at spaces including Casa Des Artes, (PT), Fridman Gallery (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Knockdown Center (NY), MOCAD (MI), Nefertiti Jazz Club (SE), Performa 2011(NY), Pioneer Works (NY), MoMA PS1 (NY), Roulette (NY), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), The Swiss Institute (NY), The Guggenheim BMW Lab (NY), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), The Sage (UK), The Stone (NY), The Tate Modern (UK), ULU (UK), Worm (NL), and many more!
